Survivors of Yamatai
by Space Viking
Summary: When Sam, Carlin, and Antori crash-land on an uncharted planet ruled over by a murderous cult of hardened survivors who worship the Sun Queen of ancient Japanese legend, they must discover the secrets of the mysterious world or be trapped on it forever. Set in 2407, featuring Sam, Carlin, Antori, and the crew of the USS Nautilus. *Contains Violence: Rated M just to be safe*
1. Call in the Night

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

***Spoiler Alert***  
This story contains plot elements and character and location details borrowed from the 2013 Tomb Raider game, and author's notes discuss the similarities at length. If you do not wish to view potential spoilers on this game, you should not read this story or the accompanying notes.

* * *

_**Call in the Night**_

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Captain's Log, Stardate 81587.01:_

_Captain Sokar recording. Shipboard time is 02:38 hours. I have been awakened by officer-of-the-watch Lieutenant Toban, who has informed me of a Priority One message we received from Starfleet Command, directing us to depart from our patrol in the Risa Sector and reach Starbase 24 with all possible speed. I am not surprised by the order to move closer to the front lines. Though the _Nautilus_ is too old to participate in the counter-offensive in the Arachnis Sector, it can still be useful for deterring raids deeper into Federation space by the Klingons and their allies. What puzzles me is why Starbase 24 was chosen as our particular destination, as the station is already well-defended. Perhaps the communication from Starfleet Command will clarify the nature of our diversion. I am taking it in my quarters._

* * *

Captain Sokar removed the _sehlat_ cub that the crew had affectionately named "Snaggles" from the chair in front of his desk, placing the mewling animal on the floor before taking the chair himself. The screen of his terminal was already lit with the crest of Starfleet Command and the words "Incoming Priority One Message: Secure Channel." Sokar tried to smooth his uniform with one hand and activated the channel with the other. The crest disappeared and was replaced by Admiral Jorel Quinn's face. The Trill admiral looked significantly more haggard than when Sokar had last seen him, and his hair was starting to go gray in earnest now. Sokar did not need any medical training to attribute his appearance to stress, nor any psychological training to know that the war was the likely cause of that stress.

"Sorry to wake you, Captain," the Admiral said, by way of introduction.

"An urgent message can never be made to wait for a more conducive time," Sokar said. "You are not responsible for the timing of this event."

Quinn laughed half-heartedly. "Oh for the wisdom of a Vulcan," he said. "I confess I've always had a soft spot for your people, Sokar. No fuss, no complaint, no drama, and they always get the job done. We could use some more of that around here."

Sokar said nothing, folding his hands and sitting back, waiting for the Admiral to finish.

Quinn noticed and shook his head. "Right, sorry. I guess I could use another cup of coffee just about now," he remarked. "Anyway, you're probably wondering why your ship has been diverted to the Starbase 24 on such short notice."

"Indeed," said Sokar. "I assume it is a part of the war effort."

"Practically, yes," said Quinn. "Officially, it's my last act as head of Starfleet Science before they put me on fleet command for the entire Sirius Sector Block, which makes it a scientific expedition, a mission of exploration, if you will. Admiral Grall is still going to insist we perform those, as a basic part of what Starfleet is—and who knows, we might find something or someone out there to help us win the war with the Klingons."

"We are to explore uncharted space near Starbase 24, then?" Sokar asked.

Jorel shook his head. "No, the stop at Starbase 24 is only a layover, I'm afraid. You're to pick up a few personnel transfers from the _USS Endurance_ to bring you back to full strength, and also a very important passenger. Are you familiar with a Doctor Mor?"

"I confess that I am not, Admiral," said Sokar.

"He's something of a celebrity, at least in certain circles," said Quinn. "He's a Ferengi archeologist who dramatizes his discoveries and broadcasts the holovids as entertainment. Most of the scientific community thinks he's sold his soul for fame, but he does occasionally make valid archeological finds. A few weeks ago, he made one involving unusual laracite traces in pottery from an early Iron-Age culture on Earth."

Sokar cocked an eyebrow. "I regret to say I am unfamiliar with laracite."

"I had to look it up myself, too," Quinn admitted. "Laracite is a rare crystalline compound that only forms in interstellar space. It sometimes falls as spacedust to planetoids and becomes a part of the local geography. It's inert, with no special properties, but archeologists sometimes use it to determine what region of space an artifact came from, as different regions produce slightly different isotopes. The isotope Dr. Mor discovered is called laracite-OFT. There is only one place where it's known to occur naturally: the region in and around Dragon's Head Nebula."

Sokar straightened in his chair. "The Dragon's Head Nebula is near the borders of Klingon, Romulan, and Federation space, not far from the Nimbus system. How could a mineral native to only that region of space find its way to ancient Earth?"

"That's what we want you to find out," said Quinn. "The Dragon's Head Nebula has been considered an impassible navigational hazard since it was first charted over two hundred years ago. Cargo ships and even warships avoid the area if they're smart, which is one reason we can get away with having such a small patrol in that part of space. But if pottery made there was brought to Earth some time in the ancient past, it might mean the nebula isn't as un-navigable as we thought, and if that's the case…"

"Then the nebula could serve as a blind spot, allowing Klingon forces to outflank our Arachnis counter-offensive," Sokar finished.

Quinn nodded. "We'd have to divert more ships to patrol the region, which would mean either pulling them off of patrols elsewhere that are already spread too thin, or else reducing the our forces in the Arachnis Sector itself."

There was a pause. After a moment, Sokar said, "I don't suppose there is any chance Doctor Mor's discovery was flawed or fabricated?"

Quinn shook his head. "It's been independently verified by scientists on Vulcan and Trill. The pottery is genuine, from the Earth nation of Japan approximately twenty-two hundred years ago, and the concentrations of laracite-OFT simply could not have been native to Earth. Dr. Mor has some theories on how it got there, and I want you to check them out...and determine whether or not the Dragon's Head Nebula is still secure."

"Understood, sir," said Sokar. "Is there anything else I should be made aware of?"

Jorel sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. "There is," he said. "One of the personnel transfers that's waiting for you at the starbase is a Lieutenant Samantha Hayashi."

"I have heard of her," said Sokar. "An extremely talented pilot and the youngest daughter of the Belo-Hayashi family." The name seemed familiar for some other reason, but for the moment, Sokar couldn't place it.

"Then you've only heard half of the story," said Quinn. "Sam Hayashi is a born troublemaker with a disciplinary record as long as your arm. It's mostly pranks and harmless stuff, but she can try any commanding officer's patience. Captain Ramsey somehow managed to get her to straighten out, more or less, a couple years ago on the _Endurance_, but there's no telling what she'll do under a new captain."

Sokar considered for a moment. "I will manage her carefully, Admiral, but I believe a pilot of her caliber will be an excellent asset to this crew, particularly on a mission to the Dragon's Head Nebula. I will make preparations for her transfer."

Quinn nodded. "Good luck, and good hunting, _Nautilus_. Starfleet Command out."

The screen went dark and Sokar stared at it for a moment. Snaggles nudged his hand with a cold, wet nose, but he ignored it. He knew that lieutenant's name from somewhere else, he was sure. _Samantha Hayashi…wasn't that someone Lieutenant Carlin Agran mentioned?_ The more he thought about it, the better he recalled the conversation, remembered that Carlin _had_ specifically mentioned Hayashi as one of her closest friends and roommate during her Academy days. _Lieutenant Agran is an excellent officer_, he thought. _If there are any disciplinary problems with Lieutenant Hayashi, she could help to stabilize the situation. _Besides, the way she had talked, it seemed very probable that she would be pleased to see her friend "Sam" again, and would like to be informed of her immanent transfer.

That announcement could wait until morning, however, Sokar decided. For now, he petted the _sehlet_ cub, picked it up, and returned it to its bed before returning himself to his own.

* * *

Author's Note: In the game, Starbase 24 is nowhere near the Klingon territories, but in the canon, it's established as the world closest to the Klingon colony of Khitomer. _Sehlet_ cubs, seen in game, look something like miniature lions and so I've envisioned "Snaggles" as having a somewhat cat-like personality. Grall, in game, is a lieutenant who gives the player exploration missions. I decided it would be more appropriate for him to order ships around if he was an Admiral.

For full disclosure, this story is based heavily on elements from the Tomb Raider 2013 game. This chapter pays tribute to the Tomb Raider game with several shout-outs, including the _Endurance_ (the name of the ship Lara travels on in the game), the Dragon's Head Nebula (Lara travels to the Dragon's Triangle in the game), and—corniest of all—the fictional isotope laracite-OFT (take out the "ite" and read it all together). The character of Dr. Mor is based on Doctor James Whitmore from the game, and Sam Hayashi's character—though developed in my previous story—owes much to the character of Sam Nishimura from Tomb Raider.

And before you ask, there will be no "Ensign Lara Croft" appearing in this story!


	2. Old Friends

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

_**Old Friends**_

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Flight Controller Samantha Hayashi's Log, Stardate 81623.6:_

_Things have been busy my first two days aboard the _Nautilus_. Aside from all the settling in to do, there's a high-warp course to the Dragon's Head Nebula to chart and execute, hopefully while avoiding any unwanted attention from Klingon raiders that may be in the area. The _Miranda_-class is decently maneuverable and well-armed for a ship of her size, but still not a match for a Bird-of-Prey or two striking from ambush. With all the work, and the necessary avoidance of further contact with a certain Ferengi nuisance known as Doctor Mor, I haven't had a chance to really talk to Carlin yet. We've arranged to make up for it as soon as we get off-duty today, though, which is good, because I need to ask her if she'll join me on a double date with Mark and Jack Delaney, the dreamy-looking twins I couldn't help but notice in the Stellar Cartography department…_

* * *

Lieutenant Samantha Hayashi, or _Sam_, as she liked to be called, brushed some strands of short, jet-black hair from her face as she set a quick pace through the corridors of the _USS Nautilus_. This was the first time since she'd come aboard that she and her old friend had found the time to get together, and she wanted to make sure she saw her friend before anything else came up and took that time away from them.

"Computer, locate Carlin Agran," she prompted, entering the turbolift.

"Lieutenant Carlin Agran is on Deck 4, Section 3, Senior Officer's Quarters," reported the Computer's female monotone.

"Take me there," said Sam.

The turbolift departed with a hum and arrived after just a few moments. Sam stepped out and came around a corner, only to stop short. Carlin was there, alright, but she wasn't alone. There was a Trill man with her: tall, blond, well-muscled, and wearing the red uniform jacket of a command-division officer with three solid silver rank pips on his chest. He was kissing Carlin, and she was obviously enjoying it. Sam smirked and turned away, deciding to pretend she'd arrived a little later, so as not to interrupt. But Carlin had already seen her.

"Wait, Sam!" Carlin called, motioning for her to come. Sam approached the couple, who were now standing slightly apart, and Carlin made introductions. "Sam, Antori Drel. Antori, this is Sam Hayashi. We were roommates back at the Academy," she said.

The Trill man shook Sam's hand. "A pleasure to finally meet you, after hearing so much about you."

"Only good things, I hope," said Sam, grinning.

Antori shrugged. "That depends on the source," he said, and pointed to Carlin. "Her, or the Admiralty." He smiled. "Fortunately, it seems all of the worst rumors were untrue."

"I hope I haven't disappointed you too much," said Sam.

"I have to admit, I was looking forward to that thing Carlin says you did to her tricorder in her Field Medicine class."

Sam laughed. "Sorry, but I solemnly swore never again to reprogram a tricorder to make inappropriate noises."

"Well, in that case, I imagine you two have a lot to catch up on," said Drel. "I'll leave you to it." He retreated into his quarters.

Sam and Carlin turned and made their way down the corridor back to the turbolift. "I'm sorry this is the first time we've had a chance to get together," Carlin said. "With all the preparations we've been making for this mission, and all the last-minute demands of Doctor Mor, I haven't even had a chance to give you a tour of the ship."

"Ugh, sorry you got stuck with that little Ferengi rodent," said Sam, shuddering.

"I'm sure not all Ferengi are that bad," said Carlin.

"Oh, they're not. My family works with plenty of them, which is why I can say with authority that Dr. Mor is a rodent."

"My xenobiology textbook would have disagreed."

Sam laughed. "Very funny." They stepped into the turbolift.

"Deck 2, Observation Lounge," Carlin ordered. It only took a moment for them to arrive at their destination. When they did, they stepped out onto a balcony overlooking the Mess Hall. Across from them a broad bank of windows offered a view out past the rear of the ship, where star-streaks retreated at high warp, framed by the secondary hull below and the _Miranda_-class's unique "weapons pod" above. "Best view on the ship, short of the Bridge or the Astrometrics Lab," Carlin said.

"No kidding." Sam leaned against the railing, looking out at the stars. She looked over as Carlin joined her. Her eyes landed on the two silver pips on Carlin's breast. She shook her head. "Drel was right, we do have a lot of catching up to do. A lot has changed. We're both lieutenants, I haven't been on report in almost a year, and you looked _very_ comfortable with the Commander back there." Sam smiled. "I remember back in the Academy I had to practically drag you away from your studies so you could grab a drink with me down at the Quantum Café and check out all the cute young officers."

Carlin blushed and studied the railing. "Antori and I…we've been dating a while," she said when she looked up.

"How long's that?"

"Next week will be our two year anniversary…of dating that is." Carlin pulled her auburn pony tail over her shoulder.

Sam let out a slow whistle. "I take it you're serious then."

"Serious enough that I've been thinking of just how and when I should ask a certain question."

Sam eyed her askance.

"In Trill society, the man typically begins a relationship by asking the woman out, but it's the woman who proposes," Carlin explained.

"Ah. Well, I suppose that means it's a _no_ on the double date I was going to ask you on tonight: me and Mark Delaney, you and Jack."

Carlin laughed and released her ponytail. "Yes, I think we can safely say a double date with the Delaney brothers from Stellar Cartography is out of the question. You can still go out with Mark, though."

Sam shook her head. "Apparently the twins do everything together, so it's a double date or no date." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "But my chances aren't totally ruined. I bet I could talk Tom McKensey into a double date with me, you, and Antori."

Carlin snorted. "You, and Ensign McKensey?" She shook her head.

"And why not?"

"Let me put it this way: you date for fun, McKensey dates only to find someone to share his last name."

Sam made a face. "I guess you're right. He sounds a bit too serious for my tastes. I've changed some since the Academy, but not that much."

"Speaking of which, I haven't heard any reports of prank-related disturbances since you came aboard…and did you say you hadn't been put on report in almost a year?" Carlin shook her head. "The Sam Hayashi I knew would have been doing good to stay off report for a whole week!"

"I owe that to Captain Ramsey's influence, and some experiences of my own." Sam shrugged. "What can I say? The ghosts of Starfleet past, present, and future visited me in a shuttlecraft one night and taught me the true meaning of Christmas."

Carlin gave her a weird look. "What did you say?"

Sam laughed. "Nevermind. It's a human culture reference."

"Japanese?"

"English, actually. Charles Dickens."

"Never heard of him," said Carlin. "I didn't get very far in Classic Literature of the Federation."

Sam shrugged. "It was a dumb joke anyway. Shall we go down and grab something to—" Before she could say _eat_, something caught her eye. She glanced up to see the starfield behind the ship had gone still, its stars no longer distorted by warp speed.

At that moment, both lieutenants' combadges chirped. "Attention all hands," said the dry voice of Captain Sokar. "We have reached the Dragon's Head Nebula. Senior Staff, please report to your duty stations and prepare your analysis and recommendations. There will be a mission briefing at 20:00 hours. Doctor Mor, your presence is requested at the briefing tonight. Sokar out."

"I guess that settles my problem of figuring out what I'm doing tonight," said Sam.

"You and me both," said Carlin. "Personally, I'd rather date a Borg drone than spend the night working with Dr. Mor."

Sam giggled. "I told you he was a rodent." Carlin made no response but to roll her eyes. Then the friends turned from the balcony and together headed to the Bridge.

* * *

Author's Note: Credits for the ship layout, and the Observation Lounge in particular belong to Cygnus-x1 .net and Tim "Suricata" Davies for the cutaways of the original and refit _Miranda_-class respectively provided on their sites.

As mentioned at the end of "Airborne" many of the STO Federation uniforms place rank insignia on the chest instead of the collar, and my uniform variants color them silver for better in-game visibility.

I played a little with Earth-vs-Trill culture here. The bit about gender roles on Trill is completely made up, but since we never see Jadzia and Worf's proposal, I think it's at least plausible. Also, it's always been strange to me how everyone in Starfleet seems to get references to even the most obscure Earth culture trivia—things that viewers would logically know, but Klingons, for instance, probably wouldn't. I decided to subvert that trope here by having Carlin miss the reference to Charles Dickens. After all, Sam would hardly know a 19th Century Trill author either.

There are a couple of shout-outs here to _Voyager_. The Quantum Café was a bar included in Species 8472's recreation of Starfleet Headquarters in the episode "In the Flesh." There's also a bit of Sam and Carlin channeling the spirits of their _Voyager_ counterparts: Tom Paris (the mischievous pilot) and Harry Kim (the serious young officer). Tom tried and failed to get Harry to go on a double date with the Delaney sisters from stellar cartography in "Time and Again," saying it was "a double date or no date." Tom also explained his past to Harry in "Caretaker" with an off-color reference to Charles Dicken's _A Christmas Carol_. Finally, of course, Harry was the first person on _Voyager_ to develop a crush on former-Borg-drone Seven—which, given his hilariously bad luck with relationships, ended badly for him.


	3. Legend of Yamatai

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

**_Legend of Yamatai_**

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Science Officer Carlin Agran's Log, Stardate 81624.0:_

_We've completed our initial scans of the Dragon's Head Nebula and the surrounding systems. There are definite signs of the isotope we're looking for, but only inside the nebula itself. The question is, how did an isotope unique to one of the most impassible nebulae in the quadrant wind up on Earth over 2,000 years ago?_

* * *

Captain Sokar took his place at the head of the briefing room table. "Before we get started, Doctor Mor, I'd like you to tell us about the archeological find, and what theories you have as to its origin."

"Thank you, Captain." The Ferengi stood and gave a toothy grin. "The find was a stash of pottery found on the main island of the Earth archipelago called _Jahpan_. Most of them had been smashed to dust by the ravages of time, but one was fairly well preserved. This is what I was able to reconstruct of what it looked like." He produced a palm-sized holoprojector and switched it on. A clay vase appeared, ghost-like, over his hand. Though pieces of it were missing and there were visible cracks even in the reconstruction, a design could clearly be made out on one side: it was the image of a woman in flowing robes, with rays of light shining all around her. "This was the piece that most definitely contained concentrations of laracite-OFT."

"Any idea who the female figure is?" Drel asked.

"Ah, you noticed her." Mor gave another toothy grin. "Yes, I believe she is Imego, the Sun Queen of Yamatai, a figure of ancient Japanese mythology."

"It's Himiko, actually," said Sam, looking annoyed. "And there are some scholars who believe she was a historical figure."

The Ferengi huffed. "And how would you know, _hew-mon_ woman?"

"I have a xenoarcheology degree from the Academy—"

Mor snorted. "And you're going to pretend that makes you qualified?"

Sam ignored the interruption. "Also, I'm from that Japanese archipelago, or at least, my ancestors were. My grandmother still lives there, and she's the one who first told me the story of Himiko."

Carlin looked up from her PADD. "Yes, and I remember you told it to me a few times too." She smiled. Those were some of the good days from back in the Academy. "She loves telling this story," she explained to everyone else.

"Would you mind sharing it with us, Lieutenant Hayashi?" asked the Captain.

"Oh, I don't believe this!" said Mor.

Sokar gave the Ferengi a stern look. "Doctor, you will have the floor again as soon as the Lieutenant has finished. I advise patience."

Mor grumbled and took his seat. Sam smiled broadly and sat up straight in her chair.

"Well, believe it or not, a couple thousand years ago Queen Himiko pretty much ran things in Japan. She ruled from the island of Yamatai, whose exact location has never been found, though several theories exist." Sam sat back, wistful. "Himiko was beautiful, enigmatic, but also ruthless and powerful. Legend says she had shamanistic powers."

"And that is where she always lost me," Carlin confessed.

Doctor Howard shrugged. "There's always _some_ truth to myths."

But Sam was really getting into the story now, and continued, "Himiko commanded an army of Samurai warriors, her magnificent Stormguard. They rode the very winds into battle, laying waste to all who opposed them. They say the sun rose at Himiko's command and she ruled everything its rays touched, from the mountains, to the sea, and beyond. They called her the Sun Queen, and the reverence people had for her was tantamount to worship. But one day, Yamatai simply vanished without a trace, and the Sun Queen with it, forgotten in time."

"And Doctor Mor, you think the artifact you found may be referring to this Queen Himiko?" asked Sokar.

The Ferengi nodded. "It's from the right period, positively dated at 2,200 years old. That puts it right in the middle of this Himiko-person's supposed reign."

"I take it you don't put stock in the legends, then," said Doctor Howard.

"Oh, I admit, there's probably some truth to it, but it's probably more diluted than the synthehol you serve aboard this ship," said Mor. "There is one thing I've always found interesting about the legend, that the _hew-mon_ didn't mention." He leaned forward. "They say, that Yamatai was never found or ever assaulted because it was located in the clouds, beyond the stars. It's a direct reference to early space-travel, and my find backs it up, proving that pottery made its way to Earth in ancient times from a world somewhere in this region of space."

Sokar turned to Sam. "Your opinion, Lieutenant Hayashi, as a xenoarcheologist?"

Sam shrugged. "The presence of the laracite isotope is pretty clear evidence for extraterrestrial origin. Supposing it isn't a fake, it means someone used space travel to bring either the clay or the pot itself to Earth about two thousand years ago."

"And how does the legend of Himiko fit into all this?" asked Doctor Howard.

"The fantastical descriptions of Yamatai, Himiko, and her Stormguard could all be attempts by a primitive culture to understand advanced technology," said Carlin. "Interstellar spacecraft, climate control technology, maybe even light attack craft or drop ships."

Sam nodded. "We could be looking at an early warp-capable society that didn't have any of our compunctions against coming to a bronze-age Earth from Yamatai and trying their hands at ruling the place. We know there were several species with warp capability at that time, including the Vulcans, the Romulans, the Menthar, the Promellians…it could have been any one of them or another species entirely. We know the Greek gods were based on interstellar travelers, though the last of that race died in the 23rd Century."

"But if they could use their advanced technology to rule Earth through Japan, what happened to them? Why did they stop coming?" asked Antori.

"We won't know the answer to _that_ question until we actually find Yamatai," said Mor.

Sokar nodded. He turned to Carlin. "Have you made any progress on that issue, Lieutenant Agran?"

"Yes and no," said Carlin, standing. "We completed our resonance scans of the surrounding region, but I don't think you'll like the results." She pulled up the display on the briefing room's monitor. "As you can see, the only significant amounts of laracite-OFT are inside the nebula itself. Our artifact had to have originated from there."

"That's absurd!" said Mor. "No warp-capable civilization could have developed _inside_ the Dragon's Head Nebula. It's worse than the Briar Patch in there!"

Carlin sighed and rolled her eyes, but before she could say anything, Lieutenant T'Paie came to her defense. "When one eliminates the impossible, whatever explanation remains, no matter how unlikely, must be true." She turned to Carlin. "Is there any chance the distribution pattern of the isotope could have changed in the past, allowing some to settle on nearby worlds?"

She shook her head. "If there had been, we'd still be able to detect the isotope in the planet's crusts, but the resonance scan didn't pick any up."

"Then logically, we must look inside the nebula," said Lieutenant T'Paie.

"I agree," said Carlin, changing the display. "So I took the liberty of running a gravimetric analysis of the nebula, in order to scan for astronomical bodies inside. This is what I found." A G-type star appeared, circled by seven planets. She tapped the second-closest one. "The mass and radius are Earth-like, as is the rotation period. It's also well within the habitable zone of the star."

"You're saying it's M-class?" asked Sam, sitting up.

"Possibly, but I won't know for sure until we run a spectrographic analysis of the atmosphere. We can't do that from here, so I recommend we launch a class-5 probe. That'll let us know what we're looking at without placing the ship in any danger in the nebula."

"This could be what we're looking for, sir," said Sam. "This could be Yamatai."

"Prepare the probe for launch," said Sokar. "The probe should establish planetary orbit by tomorrow morning. Until then, dismissed."

Carlin rose to leave, but before she or anyone else could take a step, Mor shouted, "Wait! Wait! There's something else we need to discuss."

Sokar arched an eyebrow. Sam rolled her eyes.

"It's the matter of documentation," said Mor. "I want to make sure I get the credit I deserve for this find, if it does turn out to be Yamatai."

If he was anyone else, Carlin would have said Sokar looked annoyed. "Our ship's computers and sensor records should provide adequate documentation, and I assure you, you will be credited for your work, as will the _Nautilus_ crew."

"That's…that's not what I meant."

"What he means is he wants to put it all on holovid for his show," said Sam.

"I see," said Sokar. "If you have the equipment with you, you may use it to make your own recordings, of course, provided Commander Drel reviews them before publication, to assure that no sensitive information about our ships systems is accidentally disclosed."

"Ah, that's not _quite_ what I had in mind either," said the Ferengi, smiling nervously.

If it were possible, Sokar's expression grew even more blank and emotionless than before. "Perhaps you would like to tell us what you _did_ have in mind?"

"I need a holocamera-crew," he said. "Someone to operate the equipment while I narrate and make discoveries."

Sokar shook his head. "I'm afraid we don't have the time to go back to Starbase 24 and pick up your associates, nor to wait for them here until their shuttle arrives."

"But you don't understand! Yamatai could be the discovery of a lifetime!"

"What you also don't understand is that the network cancelled Dr. Mor's show," Sam added, crossing her arms. "He doesn't _have_ a holocamera-crew to call on anymore."

Mor rounded on her. "And what would you know about this, _hew-mon_?! Your kind doesn't even use money anymore! You don't have the lobes for business!"

Sam studied the ceiling. "Actually, some of us still do."

Carlin suppressed the urge to laugh. "It might interest you to know, Dr. Mor, that the _hew-mon_ you're talking to is among the 100 richest people in the Federation. Her annual income is—what?—50,000 bars of gold-pressed latinum? It's enough to buy one of these ships outright every year."

"It's around 67 thousand, actually, and not quite enough for a military vessel any more, even a somewhat-dated one," said Sam. "The war's driving the prices up."

Mor looked at Sam in awe. "Who are you?"

Sam sighed.

"You'd better tell him," said Antori. "You know he won't sleep if he doesn't find out, and I don't want security to have to deal with a sleep-deprived Ferengi."

"Aye, aye, sir," said Sam. She turned to Mor. "For your information, I am Lieutenant Samantha Hayashi."

"Hayashi…Hayashi…I've heard that name before…I should remember it!" said Mor.

Sam rolled her eyes. "You ought to. Hayashi Industrial Group owns a 78% share in the media conglomerate that runs your network. That's why I know your show got cancelled."

Mor's eyes went so wide Carlin swore they were about to pop out of their sockets. "You're Samantha Hayashi! _The_ Sam Hayashi! The lost Belo girl?!"

Sam smacked her palm into her forehead. "I_ really_ hate it when they call me that."

Mor ignored the remark, turning to Sokar. "Captain, you simply _must_ give me someone to operate my holo-recorder. Yamatai or no Yamatai, the chance to appear beside the youngest Belo-Hayashi sister is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!"

"Only if I kill you afterwards," Sam muttered, so low that Carlin thought she and Antori were the only ones who caught it. Then she said aloud, "Sir, I won't disobey a direct order, but I _do not_ want to appear in a holovid show."

"I am not ordering you to do so," said Sokar, folding his hands. He almost appeared to be smiling.

"But, but—!" Mor protested.

Sam rolled her eyes and turned to him. "Look, I'm the only girl in my family who isn't a celebrity, so I wouldn't help your ratings that much, certainly not enough to convince the network to pick you up again. I'll agree to a compromise, though, if it'll keep you quiet about me: if we find Yamatai, I'll run your holo-recorder equipment—I have some experience from working with my sisters."

Mor took a deep breath and weighed his options for a moment, then he extended his hand. "It's a deal." They shook hands and the Ferengi turned to Sokar. "My concerns are quite satisfied for now, Captain."

"Very well," said Sokar, rising. "Dismissed."

Within a few minutes, everyone had filed out. Antori and Carlin were the last to leave, but as she turned, she noticed Sam still sitting at the table, staring at the hand Mor had shaken. "I'm going to regret that deal, aren't I?"

"Judging by what I've seen of Dr. Mor, and what Carlin tells me?" Antori gave her a sideways grin. "I'd say if you're smart, you already regret it."

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Science Officer Carlin Agran's Log, 81625.3:_

_We've launched a class-5 probe into the Dragon's Head Nebula to chart the star system we discovered inside yesterday. Of particular interest is the second planet, a possible M-Class world. If it is capable of supporting life, or was two thousand years ago, this could be the planet we're looking for, the one that—according to Sam's legend—was once called Yamatai…_

* * *

The next morning, Carlin stood at the science station on the bridge. "We're receiving telemetry from the probe," she reported. "We even have a visual."

"Onscreen," said Sokar.

Carlin pressed a sequence into her console and the image of the blue-green nebula on the viewscreen was replaced by the image of a planet, its sphere sparkling blue beneath swirls of white clouds. "It's definitely an M-Class planet," she reported. "Oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, indications of plant and animal life, standard gravity." She looked up. "The surface appears to be approximately 89% water. Most of the landmass is a series of archipelagos—and I'm definitely detecting significant levels of laracite-OFT in the rocks and soil."

"Where are the ruins?" asked Mor, trying to peek over her shoulder at her console. Carlin shooed the Ferengi away.

"Are there any signs of past habitation?" asked Sokar.

"Or current, for that matter," Antori added.

Carlin keyed in another sequence. An image of an archipelago from orbit appeared on the viewscreen. "There are extensive ruins on many of the islands, especially this group of islands in the north-eastern hemisphere."

"They're Japanese!" said Mor.

Sam nodded, studying the image themselves. "Looks like architecture from the Yayoi Period—the time of Himiko's reign—but they're much too well-preserved."

"There's some more recent activity, too," said Antori. He pointed to a gray object on the screen. "That's a cargo ship's hull, badly damaged, and that's a small Romulan warbird. There are several other wrecks on the islands and in the water, but I can't make any of them out from this image."

"Could there be survivors?" asked Sokar.

Antori shook his head. "It's impossible to say without closer inspection."

"I'm not picking up any identifiable power sources," said Carlin. "If there are survivors, they're laying low."

"Whether there are or aren't, there are ships down there from every era," said Antori.

"It's the find of a lifetime!" Mor shouted, having trouble keeping still.

"It's a graveyard," said Antori. "And if we don't take due precautions, we'll wind up in it too."

Sokar steepled his fingers. "Suggestions?"

"There are several ion storms in that part of the nebula. It's far too dangerous to take the _Nautilus_ in, but a shuttle should be able to make it," said Sam.

"I insist on being aboard that shuttle!" said Mor.

"You will be, I assure you," said Sokar. He turned. "Lieutenant Hayashi, you will serve as the shuttle's pilot."

"Of course, sir."

"Lieutenant Agran, as the one who discovered this planet, you will have the honor of accompanying the away mission, if you choose."

"I do, sir," she said. She was not fond of shuttle travel, but this definitely looked worth it.

"They'll need a security escort, in case there are survivors from previous crashes and they turn out to be hostile," said Antori. "I volunteer."

"I expected nothing less," said Sokar. "You launch in Shuttlecraft One at 1300 hours."

* * *

Author's Note: Like the Tomb Raider game itself, this chapter contains a curious mix of real history and complete fiction. Yamatai and Himiko are believed to be historical figures of ancient Japan, during the Yayoi Period (300BC-300AD), though no one is quite sure who Himiko was or where Yamatai is located. From there, the story Sam tells is almost complete fantasy, based on a nearly-identical story told by Sam Nishimura in the Tomb Raider game.

Sam's comment about the Greek gods is a reference to the Original Series episode "Who Mourns for Adonis," wherein the _Enterprise_ encounters a powerful psychokinetic alien posing as the Greek god Apollo. He claims that all of the Greek gods were once aliens like himself, but that they left Earth and died out from lack of worship, a fate to which Apollo himself eventually succumbs.

Sam's family background is more fully explained in "Airborne." When it comes to her annual income of 67,000 bars of latinum…well, for reference, Rom expected to buy Quark's Bar for 8,000 bars in "The Dogs of War." Her xenoarcheology interest was hinted at by the ancient pottery on her desk in chapter 2 of "Airborne."


	4. The Storm

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

_**The Storm**_

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Flight Controller Samantha Hayashi's Log, Stardate 81626.8:_

_We're approaching the planet inside the nebula by shuttlecraft. There are a few ion storms in the area, so I'm keeping alert for trouble, but so far it's been an uneventful journey, with the exception of Carlin's airsickness bothering her more than usual…and Dr. Mor bothering _everyone_ as usual. We'll be at the planet soon, though. I know it's the one we're looking for. I don't know how to describe it, but I can feel it: this is Yamatai, the legendary home of the Sun Queen Himiko._

* * *

"We're approaching Yamatai," said Sam, tapping the range indicator on the shuttle's helm. "We should have a visual soon."

"For the record, I'd like to point out that we still don't know if this planet _is_ Yamatai," said Antori Drel.

"Your skepticism is duly noted, sir," said Sam, smirking.

"You need to get the holo-recorder ready, _hew-mon_," Mor demanded. "The moment we first lay eyes on the planet is one I absolutely _must_ capture on film."

"Just try not to film me being airsick," Carlin muttered. She was leaning back in her chair with both hands over her eyes. She looked a little pale.

"Want me to turn the inertial dampners up a little more?" asked Antori.

"If you would, sure. I don't know why the turbulence on this trip is affecting me more than on previous trips."

"Space weather does have that affect on some people, and we're in pretty close proximity to an ion storm." Sam punched a command into the helm. "I added a slight phase variance to the shields. That might help."

"Good, and now that she's taken care of, maybe you can get my holo-recorder—as we agreed on the _Nautilus_!"

Sam glared at the Ferengi, but sighed and raised her hands after a second. "Alright, fine. A promise is a promise. I'll get your holo-recorder, but someone needs to fly the shuttle."

"I will of course," said Mor.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Commander, but he's not authorized, is he?"

Drel shrugged. "Well, seeing as how I never learned to fly to save my life and Carlin is airsick, it's either him or the computer."

Sam bit her lip. The conditions in the nebula weren't bad, but with an ion storm so close she definitely wanted the flexibility of a living pilot at the helm, rather than the autopilot. "Alright, Mor can fly the shuttle then."

"Great!" Mor smiled and took the pilot's seat. He studied the controls while Sam unpacked his holo-recorder and ran it through its startup sequence.

When she was done, she held the holo-recorder steady and pointed it at Mor, narrowing the field of view so that only Mor in the pilot's seat and Commander Drel in the copilot's seat were visible. "Alright, Dr. Mor flies to planet Yamatai, take one…Action!"

Mor smiled confidently and tapped a series of buttons at the helm. For a moment, nothing happened, then the shuttle veered sharply to port, nearly causing Sam to lose her balance. Mor swiftly entered a course correction, but overcompensated, sending the shuttle off-course in the opposite direction. He tried again, and again, each time more frantic, and the shuttle reeled drunkenly along a rough trajectory toward the planet, which was now becoming visible through the cockpit windows. Sam bit down on her lip to keep herself from laughing at the Ferengi.

"Could we have less…shaking?" Carlin pleaded.

"Stabilize our flight path, Doctor," said Antori.

"I'm trying! These controls are useless!"

Sam stopped the recorder and moved to stand over Mor's shoulder. "The controls are functioning normally, you just don't know how to fly." She reached over to help, but the Ferengi slapped her hand away.

"I know how to fly perfectly well, but this ship is poorly designed!"

She sighed. "If you say so, Doctor." She took a step back. "Computer, deactivate the helm interface at the pilot's console and engage the autopilot."

"Autopilot engaged."

"Stabilize our flight path and settle us into a low orbit." The computer acknowledged the order with a tone and the shuttle immediately resumed normal flight.

"You've ruined the take," said Mor.

"The take is over," Sam countered.

"And how am I supposed to fly the ship if the autopilot's on?"

"Just pretend, alright? We're entering orbit now." She raised the holo-recoreder and activated it. "Dr. Mor flies to the planet Yamatai, take two…action!"

Mor pretended to tap the helm controls sullenly. The planet spread out before him, a pristine blue jewel floating in the nebula, but he didn't seem to notice.

Just then, an alert sounded at the copilot's station. Antori silenced it and looked up. "You'd better disengage the autopilot. The ion storm just changed direction and is headed this way."

Sam switched off the holo-recorder and set it down, she shouldered her way past Dr. Mor to the pilot's seat. "Computer, reactivate helm interface." The console lit up. "Disengage autopilot." The deck trembled as the first wave of ionized particles hit the shuttle. She turned to Drel. "You might want to boast power to the shields, sir."

The Commander nodded. "Carlin, if you're feeling up to it, we could really use your help."

Carlin had already opened her eyes and turned to the science station. She reached for her pony-tail with one hand. "I don't think re-routing power to the shields will help us."

"Why not?" asked Drel.

"Because the ion storm just became level 8!"

"That's impossible," Sam said. "It was level 5 just a few minutes ago."

The ship shook and sparks flew from an overhead line, causing Mor to trip over himself in surprise. "Tell that to the storm," said Carlin. Her station beeped another alert. "It just increased to level 9!"

"That's powerful enough to damage even a _Galaxy_-class starship. We have to get out of here!" said Commander Drel.

Sam punched in a command and her console beeped negatively. "Warp drive's not responding."

"The storm's generating some kind of polaric energy field ahead of it," said Carlin. "It's preventing us from establishing a stable warp field."

"Then we'll have to get away at impulse."

Antori shook his head. "The storm's coming on to fast!"

Sam nosed the shuttle down. "I'm going to take us into the atmosphere. The ionospheric barrier should shield us from the worst of it!"

"The primary ionic front will be here in less than a minute! You'd have to descend at over 100 thousand KPH to make it in time!"

"The shuttle's hull can't sustain those speeds in atmosphere," said Drel.

"Then we'll just have to go as fast as we can." The shuttle began to shake and its hull glowed as it entered the upper atmosphere.

"Impact in thirty seconds!"

"We're gonna die! We're gonna die!" Mor squeeled.

"You're only gonna die if I shoot you for distracting me," said Sam.

"Lieutenant!"

"Sorry, Commander."

"We're coming in too fast!" said Antori. "Reduce our speed to fifty thousand KPH."

"The hull can still take the stress at eighty," Sam said. _At least, I think it can_.

"That's not the point. At this speed you won't be able to pull out in time."

"I can, trust me," she insisted. "I've only crashed a shuttle once, and that was on purpose."

"Impact in ten seconds!"

"Warning, hull temperature approaching critical!" said the computer.

"Don't you start!" Sam warned. She made the dive angle shallower and prayed it wouldn't be the last thing she did.

The ion storm hit a few seconds later. Sam struggled to keep the shuttle on its trajectory. The deck bucked wildly and sparks flew from overloading powerlines. A high-pitched whine started in the background. It took Sam a moment to realize it was Dr. Mor screaming.

"Shields down to 42%!" said Antori. The shuttle jerked and a console exploded as the shuttle took a direct hit from an ionic discharge. "Shields are offline!"

"Hang on! We're passing below the ionospheric barrier! Now entering the upper mesosphere!" The shaking suddenly abated, though air turbulence still made the deck tremble. Sam smiled. "We did it."

"Good, now full reverse thrust or we'll hit the planet."

"Aye, aye, sir!" She applied full reverse thrust. The shuttle slowed, dropping toward the cloud layer below as it came down to hypersonic velocities. The trembling stopped and the skin of the shuttle began to cool down. Even Dr. Mor began to calm and stopped screaming.

"It looks like there's a storm developing down there," said Antori, pointing to the cloud layer, which was rapidly darkening. "We should pull up, try to maintain this altitude until the ion storm passes."

Sam nodded and punched a command into the helm. The console beeped negatively and she checked it. Her eyes widened in alarm. "Sir, that ionic discharge ruptured the control lines to aft thrusters and impulse engines. I can't speed us up, only slow us down."

"And if we can only slow down…" Carlin began.

"We fall," Antori finished.

"I knew it! We're gonna die!" the Ferengi moaned.

"No one is going to die!" said Commander Drel. "Carlin, find us a place to set down."

"We're not far from the main archipelago the probe detected from orbit."

"I have it on navigational. I can glide there," said Sam.

"Can you land in this weather, with only reverse thrusters?"

"We're about to find out, sir," said Sam. She looked at the clouds below, rising up to catch the shuttle like a boiling black hand. Lightning flashed in their depths. "Everybody hang on!"

The shuttle passed into the storm-clouds and the turbulence immediately resumed. The cockpit windows went dark, with water droplets beading and streaking across its surface. Lightning flashed, but provided no useful illumination in the murky clouds, though several glancing hits caused sparks to fly around the cockpit. Sam tried to ignore them as she guided the shuttle in on instrumentation alone—until that suddenly went to static. "I just lost the sensor readout!" she said.

"It's the poleric energy field from the ion storm. It's jamming our sensors!" said Carlin.

"My last read on our altitude was 3,000 meters," said Antori. "We might be able to get below these clouds if we descend a little further."

Suddenly, a lighting bolt slammed into the shuttle's side. It reeled drunkenly and its port nacelle burst open and caught fire. Sam wrestled with the helm. "Looks like we're going under the clouds whether we want to or not! I just lost reverse thrusters and the ruptured nacelle is creating too much drag. We're going down!"

"If we hit the water at this speed we'll be break up," said Antori Drel. "If we hit the land, we'll be vaporized."

"I'm going to try to use the stabilizers to alter our trajectory, make it as shallow as possible," said Sam, fingers working franticly over the controls. "If we're lucky, we'll skip off the water's surface."

"Somehow I don't think a shuttlecraft makes a good skipping stone," said Carlin.

"We're gonna die!"

Sam gritted her teeth. "Will someone please shut him up?"

Before anyone could answer, they emerged from the clouds into the storm beneath them. Rain was falling in sheets and lightning illuminated a tossing gray sea. Sam could barely make out a craggy shape, standing out from the sea ahead of them. "There's an island directly ahead of us! I'll try to put us down just off the coast."

"I can't swim!" Mor cried.

"Don't worry, I can swim well enough for both of us," said Antori.

"I estimate twenty seconds to impact!" said Sam. "Sir, when we hit, even if we manage to bounce and reduce our speed enough to keep from breaking up, we'll eventually nose over and the cockpit will take the brunt of the damage. I recommend evacuating everyone to the aft cabin!"

"What about you?" asked Carlin.

"Someone's gotta man the helm or we're all dead. I'm the only one who can fly this thing."

"But Sam—!"

"Ten seconds to impact!" she turned to Carlin. "I'll see you on the island, I promise."

Carlin was about to protest, but Commander Drel took her by the shoulders and led her and Dr. Mor to the aft cabin. Sam turned away from them and told herself this was no time to cry. The sea loomed large before the cockpit windows and the island was distinctly visible through the storm now. _God, if I don't make it, let them be alright_, she prayed, making the final adjustments. _But I really want to make it!_

The shuttle hit, clipping the top of a wave. Sam felt the impact in every bone of her body. The shuttle pitched upward, swung a little to one side, then came back down. Sam flew out of her chair and hit her head against a console before falling, sprawled on the floor between the pilot and copilot's chairs. She managed to raise herself to a half crouch in time to see another wave rising before the shuttle, filling the entire cockpit window. _This is it! We're nosing over!_ She threw herself under the console.

If anything the impact was worse than before. This time it was accompanied by the _boom_ of transparent aluminum alloy blowing apart as it hit a wall of water at over a kilometer a minute. Sam was thrown against the bottom of the console, bruising her head and left shoulder. Sea water flooded the cockpit instantly. She tried to breathe, only to choke on water. She struggled to swim, feeling her way around churning debris. The lights of the consoles flickered and died as main power failed, but the hole that used to be the cockpit window wasn't difficult to find, and beyond it frequent lightning strikes filtered blue-white light down from the surface of the sea. It was enough to tell which way was up, but not enough to see any of the other members of the away team. Sam prayed they were alright and swam for the surface.

She came up sputtering. She tried to look around but barely caught sight of the island before another wave pushed her under. She surfaced again, gasping for breath. She could see no sign of the others. She swam for the island alone, struggling through the waves. It seemed to take ages, but at last her feet met the bottom. She staggered out of the surf and collapsed on the beach, coughing up seawater. Her muscles trembled from exertion and she was freezing, thoroughly soaked. After a minute or two, she was able to push herself to her feet and stumble up the sandy slope a bit. There were debris sticking up out of the water and the sand all over the beach: hull plates and the skeletons of ship-beams. She didn't think any of them belonged to the shuttle.

Then she noticed a red-orange glow from atop a small knoll overlooking the beach. She heard voices. One of them was high and panicked. She recognized it as Dr. Mor. "I knew it! I'm bleeding out!"

"No, you're not! Just put some pressure on it," said Carlin's voice. "Antori, a little more light here."

Sam made out the shape of a man firing a phaser at a rock. The rock was already glowing red, and now it glowed brighter. "Nobody saw Sam?" he asked.

"I think she went down with shuttl—OWW! You don't have to press it so hard!"

"Do you want to keep your arm or not?" Carlin demanded.

Sam smiled. It was so good to hear them alive! She started toward them, waving her arms. "Hello! Carlin! Commander Drel! I'm here!" But they didn't seem to hear her over the crashing of the waves and the thunder. She paused, studying the half-lit terrain, looking for the best way through to the knoll.

She never found it, for a moment later, something hard hit her on the back of the head. She lost her balance and collapsed soundlessly as her world went black…

* * *

Author's Note: Tributes and stolen elements from the game begin in earnest here. Dr. Mor's ineptitude with the shuttle controls reflects his Tomb Raider counterpart (Dr. Whitmore) failing and complaining about at least two takes of learning how to cut open a fish. Sam's first moments on the island recreates the first moments of Lara Croft on Yamatai.

Polaric energy was introduced in the Voyager episode "Time and Again," where it was a powerful but unstable energy source that could affect subspace and time (causing temporal fissures in subspace after a huge polaric energy explosion wiped out all life on a planet). It could also interfere with sensors. That being the case I don't think it would have any trouble destabilizing the warp field of a shuttle. The ion storm's severity was made with reference to the Voyager episode "Once Upon a Time." There a level 5 storm was something _Voyager_ could weather without apparent damage, but the ship fled before a level 8 ion storm. Using the "ionospheric boundary" to keep one safe from the ion storm's effects is something I made up. I don't know if it would actually work, any more than I know whether or not Sam's re-entry and landing would have worked, or else have been suicidal.


	5. Searchers

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

_**Searchers**_

* * *

_Solarii Communications Base: Brother John Briar's record: Monday, May 28, 2407, about half-past midnight:_

_Another ship has crashed on Yamatai. The upper bands of interference are dying away again. Already, we can triangulate the vessel's coordinates. Soon, we'll be able to receive more detailed data about the new crash from our sensor station on Island Four. I'll pass this information on to Father Matan. The vessel appears to be small, but if there are survivors then maybe one of these outsiders will be the one he's looking for…_

* * *

A thin Romulan dressed in the worn remains of a uniform looked up from the Dominionese flickering on the monitor before him. "We've received preliminary data from the sensor station on Island Four, Brother John," he reported.

"Good, let me see it." John pulled on a headset, its band held together with medical tape and crude wire shunts. It still worked fine, though, displaying an aerial projection of the archipelago with the sensor data on the crash interposed. The map was over thirty years out of date and—as the Solarii had discovered the hard way a time or two—no longer wholly accurate when it came to coastlines and terrain details, but it still served its purpose. John smiled when he saw where the projection placed the crash site. "Right in our back yard." He glanced over at the Romulan, Brother Talar. "The ship went down less than a mile off the coast of the Main Island."

"Any idea what it is?" asked Talar.

John shook his head. "There was too much interference, but whatever it was, it was small. I'd say no more than a half-dozen aboard."

"Survivors?"

"Hard to say, Brother, hard to say." He took off the headset before it could give him a headache. "We need to contact Father Matan. He'll want to know about this, and may even want to use the transporter to check the scene himself."

"Shall I alert any hunting parties on the island as well?"

John eyed the Romulan askance and shook his head. "You really haven't been with us very long, have you, Brother?"

Talar was silent, but his brows furrowed and his face tinted green.

"For your information," John went on. "Father Matan never authorizes hunting parties for parts or heads to be sent out until after he's reviewed the crash himself, usually personally. Maybe it's the control, or maybe She really does speak to him. Whatever the case, he'll be the one to make the call on whether or not there's anything salvageable washed up from the wreck or if the survivors should be taken in, taken out, or left to Yamatai's mercy."

Talar's mouth quirked up. "As if it had any," he said. "Do you think it's safe, though, the Father alone against an unknown number of outsiders?"

John chuckled. "Of course it's safe. Matan is one tough Cardie, clever too, and besides that…well, you remember how you were when you first crashed, before they put you in the Pit, right?"

Talar's lips curled, but this time in a snarl. The Pit wasn't a pleasant memory for anyone, but it was a necessary one, if a man was to see the Light. "I remember," he said. "I was weak, confused, hurt, exhausted…I didn't stand a chance."

"Now you get the picture, Brother. Imagine six weak, wounded, starving survivors against Father Matan," said John, then he waved the subject away. "Come on, let's celebrate." He moved over to a pile of rubble in one corner of the room and removed a fragment of duracrete, revealing a small silver flask beneath it. He unsealed it and ran the opening under his nose and smiled before passing it to Talar. "Have a drink! It's bloodwine, 2375 vintage: a very good year for everyone—excepting the bastards to built this place."

"Well, the Oni saw to _them_, or so I hear from Brother Bru'Mar."

John frowned. "The less said about them, the better. Drink!"

Talar took a swig and passed it back. John gave a lopsided grin and raised the flask in toast. "Here's to Himiko, Queen Bitch of the Universe: may she get whatever it is she's after tonight!"

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Science Officer Carlin Agran's Log, Stardate: 81627.0_

_Our shuttle has crashed off-shore of an island on the north-eastern hemisphere of the M-Class planet we discovered inside the Dragon's Head Nebula. Antori, Dr. Mor, and I managed to make it to shore all together and set up a makeshift camp on a barren knoll above the beach, around a rock heated by phaser-fire. Dr. Mor's arm was injured, but not seriously. I was able to patch it up with the medkit from the shuttle. There's still no sign of Sam, though. I saw her just after the crash, in the water, but no one has seen her since. I know she made it ashore alive. I know she's alright. She has to be._

* * *

Carlin knelt in front of the glowing rock beside Antori and warmed her hands. "Well, I finally stopped the bleeding," she said wearily.

"The prognosis?"

"The patient will be fine." She glanced over to where Doctor Mor was fussing over the luggage he'd somehow managed to grab on his way out of the shuttle, and hold onto in spite of nearly drowning and having a shard of shrapnel graze an artery in his left arm. "He definitely put my bedside manner to the test."

"You're just out of practice," Antori assured her, smirking.

Carlin returned the smile and shook her head. "If you say so, Commander." She paused, while Antori used a short blast from his phaser to reheat the rock. "I could use some good news, though. Got anything?"

"The rain's stopped and the stars are coming out—or they would be if there were any visible through the nebula," said Antori. "As it is, the view is well worth the trip." He pointed up and Carlin gasped when her eyes followed the motion. She hadn't even noticed the night sky. The clouds had begun to scatter, and through the gaps the sky glowed with the iridescent plumes and streamers of the Dragon's Head Nebula, as seen from the inside.

"It's beautiful," she said, leaning a moment on his arm while she took it all in. Then she shook her head and forced herself to look back at her surroundings. "It's not worth losing a friend, though. Any luck finding Sam?"

Antori shook his head. "My combadge and tricorder are nearly useless at range. The shuttle's transponder beacon won't be much good either," he said. "It's the polaric energy field."

"Still?" She pulled out her tricorder and ran a scan of her own. He was right: there were still significant levels of polaric radiation interfering with scans of more than a few meters. "It shouldn't still be here. Come to think of it, it shouldn't be here at all."

"You said the ion storm was generating it."

"I did, and it was the only logical explanation I could think of at the time, but it's highly unusual for an ion storm to produce even trace amounts of polaric energy…and this is more than a trace." She glanced back up at the clearing sky. "Not to mention the fact that the ion storm has obviously moved on and left us with a clear view of the nebula—but the polaric radiation isn't decreasing."

"Got any theories?"

Carlin shook her head. "Maybe it's a natural phenomenon unique to this planet, though I can't imagine what would cause it, much less allow such unstable energy to stick around."

"Could it be artificial, then?" asked Antori.

Carlin frowned, but nodded.

"I thought as much," said Drel. "Polaric energy usage and testing has been banned by treaty since the Chaltok IV disaster over a century ago, but there's no telling whether or not crash survivors living here will honor that or any other treaty. We need to be careful."

"And we need to find Sam," she added.

"You're sure you saw her leave the shuttle?"

"I saw her in the water, but I lost her when a wave hit both of us," said Carlin. "She didn't appear to be injured though, and she's a better swimmer than I ever was. She made it out of the crash alright, and she must have made it ashore. We should search the beach."

Antori shook his head. "Out of the question."

"But we're not leaving her behind!"

"I never said we were," said Antori. "We can't stay on the beach, though. We may be above the high-tide mark, I'm honestly not sure, but there's still no telling when another storm will whip up, and you can see pieces of debris washed up all over this knoll. We have to head inland. If Sam's smart, that's where she's headed already, and that's where we'll find her."

Carlin frowned and fiddled with her hair, but nodded. She didn't like delaying the search for her shipmate and old friend, but she understood the necessity. She turned her attention to the landscape inland. Cliffs loomed before her. "Any ideas on our route?"

"There's a slope that leads up to a broad ledge halfway up that cliff." He pointed. "It looks like it heads inland at that plateau over there, where the upper cliff ends. It's our best bet, and it's accessible from most points on the beach. If Lieutenant Hayashi made it ashore here, she'll probably be following the same route."

"The ledge route it is then," she said. "Do you want to get our guest of honor, or shall I?" She motioned to Doctor Mor, who appeared to be shaking sea water out of his holo-recorder.

"You take a moment to rest and gather together your medkit," he said, patting her on the back as he rose. "I'll get the Doctor."

It took Carlin less than two minutes to reorganize her medkit and the one Drel had taken with him. After that, she had time to take stock of the emergency supplies he'd managed to grab on his way out, which included the shuttle's transponder beacon, rations, fire-starters, emergency blankets and other essentials. She smiled at the thought of having a man so prepared taking care of her. _I should make it a permanent arrangement_, she thought, glancing over her shoulder, to where he was arguing, exasperated, with a Ferengi who seemed insistent that he bring every single piece of luggage he'd had on the shuttle with him. She looked away again, tugging at a strand of auburn hair. _Maybe after we're rescued, back on Nautilus_, she told herself. _Our two-year dating anniversary would be perfect_. She would have to replicate a suitable ring. It wasn't really a part of Trill tradition, but humans still used it, and several other races had picked up on the custom. She knew Antori Drel had inherited up a sense of fondness for Earth traditions and culture from Drel's previous host, Perciv, who'd spent decades working at Utopia Planetia and Starfleet Command. She thought he would appreciate it.

"Carlin? Are you ready?" asked Antori, startling her as he picked up his pack.

She blinked and threw her pony-tail back over her shoulder. "Yes, of course!" She picked up her medkit and joined him and Dr. Mor on the hike up to the ledge, trying to put her thoughts of the relationship behind her.

The terrain helped. It was rocky and littered with debris, and the one thing Antori had apparently forgotten to pack was a SIMs beacon. "I knew I forgot something," he confessed, trying to lead them along the clearest path using the light of the glowing nebula as a guide. Fortunately, the ground cleared as they made their way up onto the ledge itself, but then they ran into a problem. A shallow ravine cut through the cliff, creating a gap in the ledge several meters across. The only way to cross the ledge seemed to be a fallen log, which looked none too steady.

"We need to get rid of any unnecessary weight and make our packs as small as possible," said Antori. He was looking at Dr. Mor.

"What?" the Ferengi demanded. He patted the packs. "This is my life's work! I'm not abandoning it."

"Are the files all backed up?"

"Of course they are!" said Mor.

"Then they're not worth your life," said Antori. "If you try to cross that log with them, you'll fall into the ravine—and I will not have your death on my conscious, not if I can instill a little common sense to avoid it."

Mor huffed. "And why don't _you_ lighten your pack then, hmm?"

Antori glared at the Ferengi. He pulled the medkit roughly out of his pack and handed it to Carlin. "See if you can get all the supplies to fit in one kit. Right now it's the heaviest thing in my pack." He looked back at Mor. "And it _is_ an essential useful to our survival. Can you say the same about your luggage?"

"But how would I decide…" the little man moaned, seeming distraught.

"Let me help you," said Antori. While Carlin sorted through the medkits in the dark and tried to make everything fit in one kit, he rummaged through Dr. Mor's things, throwing useless items and—in many cases—entire packs aside, much to the Ferengi's dismay. In the end, though, he consented to cross the log with only a single pack, which contained mostly clothes and cans of jellied gree-worms. Carlin supposed those counted as food, though she'd personally rather live off emergency rations for the rest of her life than eat one.

When they were all ready, Antori crossed the log first with his pack. Dr. Mor crossed next, and-though she was afraid he would slip and fall a couple times-he managed alright. Carlin came next with the medkit. The log shifted with her weight with every step, but she took it slow and was able to maintain her balance. She breathed a sigh of relief when she was on the other side and then the three of them moved on, continuing until they reached the plateau. There, the cliff face on their left side fell away and the land on that side opened up into a rocky wooded valley, bounded by steep cliffs on two sides and the slopes of a mountain further inland.

Carlin surveyed the landscape and caught herself tugging at her hair. She made herself stop. "Where do you think Sam would have gone from here?" she asked.

"Into the valley somewhere," Antori said. "I can hear water down there, so there must be a stream. It would be a good place to set up camp, especially if her supplies were limited."

"I don't see any signs of habitation from here," said Dr. Mor, "but there are some ruins on the slope of that mountain. We should head there."

"Agreed, the mountain will make for a better camp, more easily visible from the air," said Antori.

"But if Sam's somewhere in the valley-"

"We'll find her," he assured. "We'll camp here for the rest of the night, get some sleep, and then in the morning we'll head through the valley. We can split up to cover more ground, and then rendezvous at the ruins at the top of that cliff there." He pointed. "Those should be clearly visible from any point in the valley, so we won't get lost."

Carlin nodded and helped Antori set up camp. Dr. Mor even pitched in by arranging a ring of stones for a camp fire—though of course he made the ring too small and Antori wound up having to redo it. Soon, though, they got a small fire going and Dr. Mor picked a nearby spot in the grass and fell quickly asleep. Antori saw it and looked to Carlin. "You should get some rest, too," he said.

She lay down carefully near the fire, but her eyes were on Antori. He was still pacing, looking out into the night. "What about you?" she asked. She recognized his look. "You're worried about the possibility of hostile survivors from other crashes, aren't you?"

"I could have swore we were being followed there for a little bit." He shook his head. "Whoever it is doesn't want to be seen, and is pretty good at hiding—if they're out there at all, that is." He gave her a reassuring smile. "It's probably nothing. Get some sleep."

"And if it isn't?"

He shrugged. "I've got a phaser from the shuttle, and you know I can take care of myself."

It was true. He could do more than simply take care of himself. She had seen his weekly training on the holodeck, and participated in a few of his tamer sessions. If there were any hardened, hostile survivors on this island, they had best be wary of _him_. "Just remember, my promise still stands: if you go and get your neck snapped trying to wrestle a Gorn in real life, I will kill you, especially if you have the nerve to die on me."

He chuckled. "I'll be sure to make a note to avoid such encounters in my log, Lieutenant," he said. "Now get to sleep. That's an order."

Carlin smiled and settled her head onto her hands. "Yes, sir."

* * *

Author's Note: My first bad-guy POV section! I had considered doing without them, since they don't appear in the game, but I thought I would use them to make up the lack of "documents" and "relics" that add flavor and backstory to the game. I also thought it would be useful for filling in some of the unexplained things from the game.

The Solarii are a group in the game, and I'll be sticking pretty close in my portrayal of them here, excepting making them all alien-survivor cultists, of course! There are lots of references in their section that may not make sense until later. The Oni are a group in the game, and I'll be portraying them even more faithfully than the Solarii, given who and what they are. Father Matan is the Cardassian (or "Cardie"—as is the slang term for them used several times by O'Brian in DS9) version of Father Mathias from Tomb Raider. The Solarii are using Earth dates rather than Stardates for their records for reasons that will hopefully become more apparent later on.

Brother John's profane reference to Himiko is almost an exact quote of a drunken Solarii from the game. The mooks will say a lot of things, talking, interacting, and giving away details of foreshadowing if the player will wait patiently in ambush for them to finish their dialogue before ruthlessly slaughtering them all (hey, they _are_ mooks!).

Carlin is out of practice with her bedside manner, presumably, because she hasn't worked in sickbay since the end of the events of "The Best Revenge" almost two years ago. Antori Drel was first seen "training" by fighting a Gorn in chapter 3 of the same story, though he did not attempt to wrestle it.

A SIMS beacon is the wrist-light that appeared several times in _Voyager_. Gree-worms were a Ferengi food mentioned in DS9.


	6. Scavenger's Cave

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

_**Scavenger's Cave**_

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Flight Controller Samantha Hayashi's Log, Stardate Unknown…Day 1, I guess?  
How do I start?...Okay, this is Lieutenant Sam Hayashi, a pilot and xenoarcheologist from the _USS Nautilus_. My shuttle crashed here on this planet somewhere inside the Dragon's Head Nebula. From what we saw of this planet from space, it's incredible! There are ancient ruins here. The wrecks we saw could also date back centuries, and they're from practically every space-faring civilization in the quadrant. We're not the first to crash here, and we're not alone. Someone was good enough to prove that to me the minute after I swam ashore—separated from my crewmates—by giving me a whack on the back of the head. I have no idea where I am now, but I assume I'm still on the island where our shuttle went down. …Something isn't right about this place. If I don't get off this planet, maybe Starfleet will eventually find this tricorder and recover my log._

* * *

Sam was aware of a dragging sound, the sensation of something wet and rough against her face. Her eyes drifted open and closed. She saw candles, the rock floor of a cave, bones and human skulls. None of it made sense. Water dripped down onto her face from somewhere. She closed her eyes again, hoping that when she opened them again she would find herself back in her quarters aboard the _Endurance_—or was it the _Nautilus_? She could not remember. It didn't seem to matter, because the next time she opened her eyes, the world was upside down. She could hear the sound of creaking ropes as an engraved wall mural surrounded by burning candles lowered itself into her field of vision. Her head ached. She decided to close her eyes again until it stopped.

It seemed only a moment later when her eyes snapped open again, awareness dawning on her. The world wasn't upside down, she was. She was hanging by her feet in some kind of bundle made of heavy fabric lashed together with thick ropes. Only her head was free. She could see three other bundles of similar size hanging around her, but couldn't see anyone in them.

"Help!" she shouted. "Carlin! Antori! Help!" There was no answer. For all she knew, they weren't even on the island anymore—supposing that she still was.

She turned her head, trying to take stock of her situation. She was suspended in some sort of vertical shaft in a cave, a good three meters above the floor. There was a catwalk between her and the bottom, made of badly corroded metal sheets. To her right, carved into the wall, was some sort of shrine, surrounded by burning candles, among which she caught sight of several humanoid skulls. "Whoever owns this place needs a decorator…and I need to get out of here."

She struggled against her bonds, but the heavy fabric and the ropes kept her from moving her arms more than a fraction of an inch, and she could not move her legs at all. But when she struggled, it set her swinging, and that gave her an idea. _I wonder how strong these ropes are._ She swung from side to side, twisting her torso as much as she could with each swing in order to build momentum. She wondered how much strain the rope could take before it snapped—or if she would wind up knocking herself senseless against the walls of the shaft first.

Just then, she bumped into one of the other bundles. It bounced off of her, swinging on its own. It swung straight over the shrine and the flames of the candles licked at it eagerly. Within seconds, the bundle was ablaze, a flaming pendulum. It hit a wooden crosspiece that was about level with Sam's chest and lit that on fire as well. Then, the charred fabric tore and a humanoid skeleton tumbled out. It hit the catwalk and the corroded metal panels collapsed, leaving Sam suspended three meters in the air next to a flaming wooden crossbeam. Meanwhile the rope that was holding her wasn't showing any sign of strain.

"I need a new plan, or I'll be stuck here till I end up like whoever that was." She glanced at the flaming bundle. It was disintegrating rapidly, and as each piece fell off, it landed in a shallow pool of water on the floor, extinguishing itself. She looked at the burning crosspiece. It must have been soaked in some kind of fuel spill, because it was burning very well, with no sign of breaking up. If she changed her swing just slightly, she would wind up in the flames—and if the bundle holding her burned as well as the other bundle… _I wish I had a better idea_, she thought. _At least Starfleet uniforms are flame-resistant._

She twisted a little, altering her swing. Her bundle bumped against the burning crosspiece and flames immediately began to spread across its surface. Her hands twitched. "Ow! Hot!" She hadn't been thinking about her hands. She tried to move them away from the spreading flames before the fire could chew through the fabric and touch them, but she was so tightly bound she couldn't move. _This is gonna hurt! This is gonna hurt!_

Just then, the rope holding the bundle closed snapped. Sam tumbled out, falling and crying in surprise. She tried to brace herself for the landing and saw just a moment too late a piece of rusty rebar sticking up out of the ground like a miniature stake. Then, she hit. Pain erupted from her left side. She screamed and rolled, but that only made the pain worse. She made herself lay still, gritted her teeth, and opened her eyes.

The rebar was there. Four centimeters of its length sprouted from her left side, covered in blood and rust. Reaching back, her hand brushed a smaller segment of it, emerging from her back on the same side. Touching it made her feel like her side was on fire. She cried out and rolled to her right side. Her hand reached up and tapped her combadge. "Sam to Carlin! Medical emergency!" There was no answer, only silence. "Sam to Carlin, please come in!" Nothing. She tapped her combadge again. "This is Lieutenant Samantha Hayashi of the starship _Nautilus_, if anyone can hear me please respond. I need immediate medical attention." Only the stillness of the cave answered her.

Sam groaned. _Okay, don't panic…you took basic medical, remember?_ She told herself. Her hand fumbled for her tricorder and pulled it out. _Time for Doctor Hayashi to save the day_. She flipped open the tricorder and set it for a basic medical scan. Then she turned it around and held it over the wound, listening until it gave a "scan complete" tone. When the tone sounded she lay back in the water, breathing heavily and took a look at the results. She moaned. _Well, the good news is I didn't puncture any organs. The bad news is there's a piece of rebar one centimeter across and ten centimeters long stuck in me, and it looks to be carrying about every kind of infection you can imagine_. She shut the tricorder and shoved it back into its pocket.

"Okay, think," she told herself. _I have to get it out and get some antiseptics and antibiotics in me quick…but if I take it out now, I'll have to contend with bleeding out through a one centimeter hole running through my body. The best thing to do…the best thing to do is just try to stabilize it._ The question was: how?

"My uniform jacket," she said aloud. "If I can just get it off and tie it around my waist…" She unfastened and removed the jacket carefully. Each time the uniform bushed the spike in her side, it sent new stabs of pain through her body. Nevertheless, she managed to get it all the way off and tie it securely around her waist, wrapping it over the ends of the rebar, immobilizing it as best she could. Then, she lay still for a few minutes, waiting while the pain subsided to more tolerable levels.

"Alright…doctor's orders are…get medical attention as soon as possible, and don't make any sudden movements…under the circumstances, kinda contradictory." She began to laugh humorlessly, but it turned into a moan as the motion sent a fresh wave of pain through her side. _Okay, I can't laugh, and I can't wait here_, she told herself. _Eventually whoever stringed me up is gonna come back and find out I'm not his human piñata anymore, and I don't want to stick around for that!_ She made herself sit up, gritting her teeth against the pain, and flipped open her tricorder, setting it to a general scan.

"Something's wrong," she muttered. "The range is too limited, barely more than a few meters…something must be interfering with its sensors." She shut the tricorder and tucked it away. "Guess that leaves us with the old-fashioned way of navigating." She could see a passageway leading away from the shaft just a few meters away from her. There was air movement from that direction, and light, too. Commander Conrad Saganami had been her Ground Survival Training instructor, and he would have killed her personally if he'd thought for a second that she couldn't find her way out of a cave with those two hints to guide her. She pushed herself to her feet and forced herself to start walking.

The cave floor was littered with bones and rocks, but at least it stopped being covered in cold water. Soon after it dried out, she reached the source of the light, another shrine, this one with a much larger profusion of red candles centered around a crude white-wash painting of a robed woman with rays of light drawn spreading out from her. That wasn't all, though, and Sam gasped at the sight of what accompanied the shrine. There was a real woman there, too, a Bajoran dressed in civilian clothing, hanging with arms spread over the shrine, suspended by ropes tied around her wrists. The Bajoran's head hung limp over her bloodied tunic. Sam fumbled out her tricorder and scanned the woman. The tricorder gave a long negative tone. "Dead," she whispered. "My God, what did they do to you?" It was then that she noticed two skeletons tied up beside the shrine. She couldn't identify the species, but both were humanoid. She shuddered. "Who would do this?" she asked, before realizing that, for the moment, it didn't matter. _What matters is making sure they don't get a chance to do it to me_.

She studied the chamber. There was only one way out, a darkened passageway with glass bottles strung up and hanging in front of it, but she could still feel airflow from that direction. She grabbed a torch from a bracket on the wall beside the shrine and pushed past the hanging bottles. They clanked and rattled against each other as she pushed by and the sound seemed to echo through the passageways. She thought she heard a voice somewhere in the distance. She thought of whoever tied her up, whoever killed the Bajoran, and quickened her pace.

The floor of the passage became wet again as it descended. It wasn't long before Sam was wading through knee-high water. She stumbled through the passageway, clutching her side, until she began to see light ahead, and hear the sound of crashing water. A minute later, she emerged into a large, flooded chamber. She noticed there was a passage branching off near where she came in. The entrance was blocked with a thick metal grate with several barrels tied to it with ropes. There were some electrical devices rigged up to the barrels. Sam recognized them as crude proximity detonators and stepped back. She scanned the barrels quickly. "Primitive gunpowder explosives," she said. It was crude, but easy to whip up and plenty effective in large enough quantities. "The proximity detonators are facing outwards, through the grate." Obviously whoever owned this cave didn't want any unannounced visitors from that direction, which made Sam think that passageway could be her ticket out—provided she could get past the bombs without blowing herself sky-high.

She started around the chamber, checking for an easier way out, but all the other passageways were either blocked by rocks or pieces of scavenged metal or else four meters off the ground. As she searched, water cascaded in from one of these high entrances, causing the water already in the chamber to splash over her waist. She cried out at the sudden pain as the water touched her wound. She grimaced and staggered away from that entrance before more water could splash through. _Okay, judging from how much that hurt, this is salt water, which means, this is probably the ocean_. Most M-Class worlds, for whatever reason, had salt-water oceans. _And if this is the ocean then the water coming in is_— Another wave of water cascaded into the chamber. _—the tide!_ She searched the room for high-water marks and bit her lip when she saw barnacle-like shellfish attached to rocks on the ceiling.

"I think it's safe to say this whole place is going to flood," Sam said to herself. "And that grate looks like my only way out." She edged closer to the bombs, but she had neither the tools nor the time to disarm them. _Whoever owns this place has got to have a way out, look for that._ She found a motor hooked up to the grate. It was a clumsy arrangement, but it looked like it could raise the grate just enough for someone to get through without setting off the proximity detonators. Unfortunately there was another detonator wired up to the motor's controls, she supposed as a deterrent to anyone trying to activate it without the right codes. "Whoever lives in this cave is seriously paranoid," she muttered.

Just then, the water reached waist level. She flinched as the salt water stung her wound. _I don't have time for this. There has to be a way around the boobytraps…maybe if I set them off remotely._ She wracked her brain. Gunpowder was unstable and vulnerable to heat and electrical discharge. If she could get her torch over to the barrels where the detonators were, she had a chance of producing both. Of course, she would need to do so while somehow standing on the opposite side of the room unless she wanted to be blown to pieces. Strangely, she didn't.

She looked around for anything else flammable. There was plenty of flotsam in the chamber, and some of it would probably burn well enough when dry, but of course it was all soaked from the sea. She noticed a large cargo container, then. It was made of the cobbled-together bulkheads of shuttles that didn't even belong in the same era, but it was held about a meter over the water by a wooden frame with access from the far end provided by a rickety scaffold and this end by a long metal ramp. Both ends were open. Sam climbed up the ramp carefully. Inside the container, she found a pile of wooden crates, debris, seaweed, dead fish, and other garbage that had washed in from the sea…only this pile was dry. _Whoever lives here must periodically gather all the flotsam up into this container and sort through it for anything useful…and just leave the rest_. She made a face. _They're almost as big of a slob as I am_.

But in this case, their untidiness was her good fortune. Practically everything in the trash heap was flammable, and of course all of it would float. She even had a ramp conveniently pointing straight down at the grate. All she had to do was torch the junk, shove it down the ramp, and pray that it set off the bombs instead of just fizzling out in the seawater.

That was exactly what she did. Of course, it had seemed a lot easier when she'd first thought of the idea. The water rose nearly half a meter while she was trying to shove the garbage together into a pile she could send down the ramp all in one go, and then of course every time she bent to push something, her side felt like it was being stabbed all over again. But at last, she lit her pile and pushed it over the edge onto the ramp. The conflagration slid down into the water and drifted into the grate. A lot of the flotsam was extinguished, but enough of it managed to stay out of the water to continue burning. She noticed several pieces burning just beneath the barrels or their detonators. Already one of the detonators was sparking. It then occurred to Sam that if she didn't want to die she had better find shelter from the immanent explosion. She pulled the near end of the cargo container closed, and not a second too soon. The blast set her ears ringing and the shockwave knocked her off her feet. Something hit the end of cargo container hard enough to make a dent the size of her head in the metal.

Then it was over. She could hear rocks rumbling and seawater pouring in. _That can't be good._ She scrambled out of the cargo container and back down into the water. It was chest high now, and the entrance she'd just opened was rapidly closing as the rocks sagged above it. Sam cursed herself and half-swam-half-walked to the entrance as quickly as she could. _Would it have killed me to run a scan on the cavern's structural integrity before I started blowing things up?_ Of course, that was assuming her tricorder would have been able to detect anything. A rock the size of Sam's torso fell into the water behind her and she decided she could give herself a guilt trip later.

The passageway beyond the grate sloped upward, taking her out of the water. She ran up the passage till she came to a fork. She could see daylight from the left fork, but before she could take it a huge boulder smashed down in front of it, sealing it shut. She ran through the right fork. Every stride made her wound feel like it was on fire. She forced herself to keep running.

She heard more splashing from the passageway behind her, and she could swear she heard footsteps in the pauses between the roaring of collapsing rubble. She turned just in time to see a Bolian man running after her. Only a patchwork of animal hides and rags covered his blue skin, and he wielded a small axe with a steel head. He swung at her, but she ducked and scrambled backward. The motion sent a wave of pain through her body, and for a moment she was afraid the scavenger would finish her, but he hesitated. The rocks rumbled above them and dust filtered down between them.

Scavenger smiled at her. "Come 'ere," he said. "I just want to help you!"

"I think I'll…pass," said Sam, breathing heavily.

"I'll make a quick end of it, put you out of your sufferin'…you won't get such an offer from _them_."

Sam said nothing, but continued backing down the passageway.

"Come 'ere! I said, come 'ere!" the Bolian lunged at her. Sam was prepared to dodge the ax again, but she wasn't prepared for the full-body tackle to her legs. It knocked her to the ground and the impact made her scream in pain. The sound must have startled the scavenger because he hesitated with his axe in mid-swing. Sam didn't give him a chance to resume. She pulled her left leg free and kicked her attacker in the nose, hard. Blue blood spurted from the broken nose. She scrambled backward, trying to regain her feet. The scavenger clutched his nose with one hand and swore, but the words were lost in the roar of falling rock. He started to rise, to pursue her, but before he could take a step a huge boulder landed on top of him, sealing the passageway.

Sam struggled to her feet and ran. She could see a ray of sunlight ahead. There was a narrow, muddy shaft leading up to the surface at the end of the passage. She raced for it, ignoring the pain. Rocks tumbled down behind her as she started making her ascent. The slope was steep, but she dug her fingers into the soil and scrambled up it madly, the sounds of the tunnel collapsing behind her spurring her on. The climb seemed to last for hours or days, with that opening into daylight always just out of reach, but it could not have been more than half a minute. Then, her head thrust through the entrance and she pulled the rest of her body out after it. Behind her, a resounding boom and a pillar of dust rose from the hole in the ground, announcing the collapse of the cave beyond.

Sam lay on the grass, muddy, battered, and wounded, her breath coming in ragged gasps between which she whispered, "Thank God…thank God I'm alive." When she'd caught her breath enough, she began to cry.

* * *

Author's Note: Here Sam continues to play Lara's role from the game, experiencing the events of the first level of the game, which is called "Scavenger's Cove." There are some minor differences, most as a result of this story taking place in the Star Trek universe rather than on modern-day Earth (ex: there are no aliens in the original). The three major differences revolve around the rebar wound, the scavenger's attack, and the bomb/grate puzzle.

The rebar wound was something that particularly bugged me and other online commentators in the original. In the game, Lara receives a wound from a piece of rebar which penetrates her side. While it looks small enough and close enough to the edge of her body that I can believe it missed anything vital, her reaction to it falls under the category of Worst Aid. She immediately pulls it out and then runs around for half the game without so much as slapping a bandaid on it, only pausing to cauterize the wound after it breaks open again due to her running into a tree. Amazingly she does not bleed out, but only has two rather small (all things considered) spots of blood on her tank top to show for it. When transporting the story into the Star Trek universe, one of the things I wanted to specifically address was more realistic treatment of this wound. Accordingly, Sam does not attempt to remove it (this is something you will find in every first-aid instruction on how to treat an impaled object) but instead wraps it heavily in order to immobilize it. She also address the fact that rusty rebar is a city of infections waiting to happen (in the game Lara seems immune to infection, or at least completely unaware of it).

The scavenger attack has been compressed and reworked. In the game, the scavenger actually attacks you twice, with a falling rock blocking his path the first time, and crushing him the second time. The first attack comes before the bomb/grate puzzle, and I didn't see any justification for the scavenger coming after her at that point (though I did hint to the justification the game used—the bottles over the entryway…though honestly Lara has made a lot more noise than those bottles by that point), plus I felt the encounters would have felt repetitive, so I compressed them and made them one encounter.

The bomb/grate puzzle was a full-fledged physics puzzle in the game, with absolutely no explanation as to why it or the mechanisms for solving it were there. I tried to avoid that here, while still keeping the challenge.

This chapter contains a couple of shout-outs to the game as well. There's the log entry at the beginning, which bears a striking resemblance to Lara's first journal entry in the game. There's also the first name of Sam's instructor: Conrad, a reference to the game character Conrad Roth. His last name is a shout-out to David Weber's Honor Harrington series, as Saganami is the name of the Manticoran Navy's training center.


	7. Woman vs Wild

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

**_Woman vs Wild_**

* * *

_Samantha Hayashi's Log, Supplemental:_

_The thing about nightmares is that sooner or later, you wake up. But I'm not waking up, which means I'm really here, on this planet, stranded, alone, and with a rusty piece of rebar impaled in my side. It means the things I saw, the things I did in that cave were real. Oh, God help me!_

_Get a hold of yourself, Sam. Don't think about it—it won't help. I just need to remember my training with Saganami. God, I never thought I would value _those_ days! But now I need to survive, I need to find the others…if they're still alive._

* * *

Sam was not really sure how long she cried, but eventually the pain in her side and the warmth of the sunlight brought her mind away from the horror of what she'd endured to the problems that still confronted her. She tried her combadge again. There was still no answer. She hadn't really expected different. Whatever was jamming her tricorder and combadge was still around, which meant she would have to find the others on her own.

_Alright, the first thing I need to find out is where I am in relation to where I was._ She remembered being dragged along the ground after she'd been knocked out, and the scavenger didn't seem to have a transporter, so it was safe to assume the place where she'd come ashore was somewhere nearby. She pushed herself to her feet and winced as the motion brought renewed pain to her side. She staggered forward a few steps and rested against the trunk of a tree. She was on a broad ledge running about halfway up a cliff face. Below her was the ocean, rocks and wrecks protruding from the crashing waves. Looking further down, she could see the beach. Something seemed familiar there. She moved closer to the edge to get a better look. "The knoll!" she said. It was the place where she'd last seen Carlin, Antori, and Dr. Mor. She recognized the large rock in the center of the knoll, scorched by phaser fire. There was no sign of anyone nearby now, though. "They must have headed inland," she told herself. It's what Commander Saganami had taught his students to do if they ever had to survive on an island.

Sam studied the lay of the land. Unfortunately, the cliff blocked her view of any path inland from the knoll, but if she continued along the ledge she was on, she would probably find it, or even run across it. She pushed off the tree and began walking.

She hadn't walked long when she came to a steep slope that provided access to the ledge she was on from the bottom of the cliff. Not far from where they joined, a small ravine cut through the cliff-face, forming a gap in the ledge that was bridged by a fallen tree. Beyond the gap, the ledge seemed to turn inland. On this side of the log bridge, she found a pile of abandoned carrying cases. One of them immediately caught her eye, one with a logo of two snakes entwined around a staff—the traditional symbol of medicine. _A medkit! _ She staggered forward as fast as she dared and fell to her knees beside it. She took a moment to examine the cover. Beneath the medical logo was written: _USS Nautilus NCC-31910: Shuttle 1_.

"This is one of ours!" she said. "They must have passed this way." She grinned and opened the medkit, but its contents turned out to be an unpleasant surprise.

The medkit was empty, except for a small unloaded hypospray. Her face fell and she felt like crying again. She supposed it had been too much to hope for that Carlin or Commander Drel would leave a fully stocked medkit just lying around in case Sam happened to find it. Probably this was just stuff the others had discarded when they'd needed to take the log across the ravine. Her search of the other containers confirmed this theory. Most of them were of Ferengi design and contained various scientific instruments, three holo-recorders, and an entire collection of Ferengi PADDs—none of which would be terribly helpful while trying to survive on an island on a strange planet after a shuttle crash. She did happen across a couple of useful items that must have been dropped by accident, though. The first was a fire-starter stick, still in its protective package. There was also a small vial that she almost crushed on accident. It fit snuggly into the small hypospray she'd found. She used her tricorder to identify the contents. The name meant nothing to her, but the entry on her tricorder said it was a broad-spectrum antibiotic. _Definitely useful for fighting infection city over here_, she thought, glancing at the rebar in her side, _but I'll still have to have someone take it out first, preferably in a way that won't leave me bleeding out_.

She tucked the fire-starter and the hypospray into her uniform pocket and pushed herself to her feet. It looked like the rest of the away team had used the log to cross the ravine up ahead. She needed to follow them. There were clouds rolling in, and if they stopped to take shelter from the storm, maybe she'd be able to catch up.

Sam started slowly across the log. Crossing it turned out to be more difficult than she'd imagined. The log shifted beneath her with every step, and the pain in her side was making keeping her balance harder. She was within a meter of the other side when the shifting of the log caused her to misstep. She began to fall, and in desperation she threw herself forward, reaching for the ledge of the other side. She caught it with one hand, despite her side screaming in protest. She reached up with her other hand to pull herself up when suddenly the ledge gave way. Sam found herself falling, then sliding along a slope. At last she tumbled to a stop on the ravine floor.

She moaned in pain, but forced herself to stand and take stock of her situation. Her right arm was a little skinned, but otherwise all her pain from the fall seemed to be coming from the previous injury to her side. There was no way she was getting back up to that ledge, though. She was at the bottom of the ravine, three meters down from where she'd started. The slope back up wasn't too steep, but in her present condition, it was more than steep enough. Behind her, the ravine floor dropped off the remainder of the cliff into the sea. That left going forward, and inland, as her only option. She hesitated, though, reluctant to leave the trail of her shipmates, but the touch of a cold droplet of rain on her face—followed by another, and another—convinced her that, for the moment, she had to worry about herself. _I need to survive first before I can find the others. That means finding the basics: food, water, fire, and shelter—especially the last two!_ She shivered.

A little ways inland, the ravine opened up into a forest of leafy trees growing among rocks and brush. By the time she reached the forest, she was already drenched and the rain was starting to fall in sheets. The trees blocked out some of the downpour, but not enough. Up ahead she saw a small sheltered ledge and she staggered toward it as fast as she could move. She ducked under the overhang and found herself in a small crevice about one meter tall, between the overhang above and the ledge beneath. She moved forward along the ledge and the crevice became taller, almost high enough for her to stand up in comfortably. There was a ring of stones there, filled with ash and black lumps of burned wood. The camp looked abandoned, though she could not say how long it had been that way. _It doesn't matter_, she told herself, rubbing her arms in a vain effort to warm her chilled body. _Right now, I need a fire._

She managed to find enough small sticks and dried brush around the margins of the crevice to build a small stack. She arranged the fuel as she'd learned in her survival class, the sticks formed into a rough cone shape and the kindling beneath. Then she carefully unwrapped the fire-starter stick, praying she would be able to use it well. It was, realistically, her only chance of starting a fire under these circumstances. She placed the fire-starter in amongst the kindling and carefully broke it in two.

The fire-starter worked beautifully. Saganami had told them the sticks contained a chemical that spontaneously ignited and burned at high temperatures in the presence of oxygen, surrounded by an inert protective coating. He also said they were a cheap technological trick and that his students should not rely on them to start fires in an emergency…but for the moment, Sam was glad to have this one cheap trick up her sleeve. The kindling ignited, and in a matter of moments, a small campfire came to life before her.

She warmed her hands and arms, and that was enough to stop her shivering. Still, she realized that in order to truly protect herself from hypothermia she would need to get out of her soaking uniform—and doing that meant dealing with the piece of rebar her uniform was currently keeping from moving around inside of her. _I need to get this thing out and get the antibiotics into me before an infection starts…before I even consider performing the totally-unsexy wilderness-survival striptease._

She looked around, trying to see if she could find any medicinal plants that might be used to at least stem the bleeding, but while most of the species seemed recognizably Earth-like, she saw nothing she could use, at least among the plants. She did notice a bundle of old cloth jammed under a rock deep in the crevice. _It's not great, but I could use it for a bandage in a pinch_. She pulled the bundle out and got another surprise: it wasn't a bundle of cloth, it was a quiver of arrows. The arrows were primitive, handmade from wood and bird's feathers, but they looked effective nonetheless. The design was aerodynamic and the heads were broad, sharp, and made of metal. She examined one of them and got an idea that Carlin or anyone with modern medical training would have probably killed her for.

_I could cauterize the wound_, she thought. _It'll hurt like nothing else, but it'll stop the bleeding much more reliably than a cloth bandage—which I don't have—and the antibiotic should protect me from infection…at least, I hope._ She removed one of the arrows and placed it by the fire, so that the metal head was exposed to the flames. While it heated, she gingerly removed her uniform jacket and pulled her (formerly) gray undershirt away from the wound. She could see the wound now, caked in layers of dried blood, and still oozing fresh blood around the base of the rebar. She told herself the time for feeling queasy would come later. Slowly, carefully, she gripped the rebar with both hands and steeled herself for the pain of what she was about to do.

"Okay…I pull this out on three," she said. "One…two…two and a half…" She bit her lip. "Come on, girl, you can do this! Just don't think about it…THREE!"

She pulled as hard as she could. The rebar slid out of the wound in one smooth motion—one smooth motion that left Sam lying on the ground, screaming in pain and then gasping for breath. Her vision blurred and for a moment she was afraid she would pass out, but she forced herself to sit up, to look at the wound. Blood was coming out of the hole in her side in spurts now. She needed to stop the bleeding fast! She picked up the arrow from the fireside, its head now glowing red-hot, and brought it toward the wound. At the last minute, she dug out a second arrow and quickly stuck its shaft between her teeth. _It helps in holovids, right?_

It didn't seem to help much in real life. The only thing it did was it prevented her from screaming her lungs out when the flat of the hot arrowhead seared her stomach. She made herself look down quickly to check her work. There was an ugly-looking burn, but no more bleeding. She could still feel blood running down her back, though. She held the arrowhead over the flames again for a moment, reheating it, and then reached around her back, straining to see what she was doing, and cauterized the entry wound. Again, biting down on the arrow in her mouth was the only thing that muffled her screaming in agony. She felt her back with her hand. There was plenty of blood, but none of it flowing from inside of her any more. Her shoulders slumped. She dropped the arrow in her hand and removed the other one from her mouth. The hard wood was now bent and had deep bitemarks. _At least I know I have strong jaw muscles_, she mused. Then she fished out the hypospray and injected herself. _Hopefully that's enough to protect me from whatever was on that piece of rebar…because that's all the medicine I've got._

Her wound dealt with for the moment, Sam carefully undressed and laid out her clothes by the fire. She then tried to find a place to sit and wait for them to dry that wouldn't be totally uncomfortable. She wound up going with her uniform jacket. _Body heat'll dry it faster, right?_

Just then, her combadge started making noise. There was a chirp, followed by static. For a moment, Sam thought she heard a voice. She picked up the combadge and tapped it. "This is Lieutenant Sam Hayashi! Do you read me?" The static continued. "Carlin? Commander Drel? Are you there?" The static faded, and the combadge was silent once more. She frowned and set it down within easy reach. _Looks like there's a chance I'll get an intermittent signal, but more than likely I'll still have to locate the others the old-fashioned way._

_Still, I'm not doing bad_, she told herself. Mentally, she reviewed her score in an effort to raise her spirits: _Death by crazy Bolian scavenger, averted. Death by impalement, averted. Death by cave-in, averted. Death by bleeding out, averted. Death by hypothermia, averted…I've had a busy day, but so far very successful on the not-dying front!_ Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she wasn't safe and sound yet. _Up next, averting death by starvation. Fun._

After an hour or two (it was difficult to say, and she could not remember the exact rotation period of this planet anyway), her clothes were dry and she dressed again, dressing her wounds first. She cleaned them with rainwater caught in her cupped hands. For bandages she tore sections from the cleanest pieces of cloth she had on hand, which happened to be from her uniform's underpants. _I always thought they could shorten the legs on these anyway._ By the time that was done and she was fully dressed again, the rain had stopped. The sun was shining again and Sam's stomach had become more insistent.

"I need to find something to eat." She pulled out her tricorder, but it was still jammed. _So much for just scanning for edible plants or wildlife_. She hadn't recognized any edible plants so far either. _Well, as dear Commander Conrad used to say, 'If you can't find something where you are, the only way to get it is to go look for it!'_

Sam slung the quiver over her shoulder and left her makeshift camp. She studied the environment around her carefully. She could hear birds in the distance, so she knew there were animals around—and those animals had to eat something, so that meant at least some of the plant life here was edible. _The question is, can I find any that's edible for humans?_

As she was thinking about that, something caught her eye. She spotted a small deer grazing nearby and she froze. From the tanned color of its hide to the antlers it bore, it looked exactly like one of the Earth species. _But what is it like on the inside?_ Sam slowly pulled out her tricorder and ran a scan, muffling the speakers with her hand. She watched the deer for any reaction, but it continued grazing, apparently oblivious to her. She glanced down at the tricorder and frowned. It wasn't registering anything beyond six meters, and the deer was at least ten away through the brush. Sam bit her lip and slowly, carefully stepped toward the deer. She kept her eyes on the animal, ready to freeze at the slightest sign that the deer might be alert to her.

As it turned out, she needn't have worried about the deer. Before she had gotten halfway to it, a black bird—a crow, Sam would have said on Earth—burst from the bush in front of her, _caw_ing loudly enough to wake the dead. The deer's head snapped up and its black eyes landed on Sam. It stepped back, then turned and fled, leaping away through the bush with apparent ease. Sam envied it. She glanced down at her tricorder. It showed a successful scan of the deer, and the crow, too. After wading through all the medical jargon, it seemed that—according to the tricorder, the two creatures were indistinguishable from their Earth-counterparts. _Maybe whoever brought pottery to Earth from here also brought some of our wildlife back with them_. At the moment, it didn't matter. What mattered was that the deer was definitely edible…supposing she could find a way to catch it.

_That could prove problematic_, she thought. She didn't have much to work with. Saganami had made sure to teach his students several snares that could be rigged even working with practically nothing, but Sam didn't have the time or the patience to rig snares and wait for one of them to catch something. Carlin, Commander Drel, and probably even Dr. Mor—the little rodent—were still out there and she needed to find them. _I can't wait around for snares_, she thought. _I need a weapon._

That seemed like a problem she could much more easily solve, though. Whoever had abandoned that camp before her had also abandoned a quiver full of arrows there, which meant that this person had also owned a bow. _With any luck, I'll find it abandoned, too…or, failing that, I'll make my own_. Improvised weapons were a part of the training Saganami had put her and the other cadets through, and Sam had already learned how to handle a bow from her grandmother, Iku, an 84-year-old _Kyudo_ master. And unlike snares, a bow could be used on things other than prey animals, if the need arose…

Just then, Sam came around a cluster of boulders and saw a small, squat, square building made of duracrete. It looked like a bunker of some kind, but it was not what held her attention. What held her attention was the corpse hanging from the tree beside the bunker. It was a humanoid, dressed in some kind of tattered uniform, decomposed beyond recognition, and suspended by its feet with a thick rope. Sam recoiled in spite of herself. "Oh, God…what's going on here?" Then, she noticed something, slung across the corpse's back: a makeshift longbow fashioned from willow branches taped together. "Wait, I can use that bow!"

She hurried across the stream. She tried the bunker first, but the external controls were smashed and inoperable and the door refused to open. She turned her attention immediately to the bow on the suspended corpse. She noticed a fallen sapling leaning halfway up the tree the corpse dangled from. From there, she thought she could just reach the bow. She climbed carefully to the top and leaned out. The corpse was swinging slightly in the breeze, just at the edge of her reach. _I have to time this just right…_, she thought. She held her breath, waited till the bow was approaching its closest, and caught it.

Unfortunately, she underestimated the momentum of the swimming corpse and the tenuous nature of her position. She fell, but fortunately it was only a fall of a couple meters, and she managed to land well enough. She checked herself for injury quickly and, finding none, looked up to find that the corpse had fallen beside her. She snatched the bow away from it and retreated quickly, disgusted by the sight and smell.

_Alright, now it's time to find that deer again_. She backtracked to the place where she'd first spotted it and looked for tracks. She had never been a great tracker, but Saganami had drilled the basics into her head well enough. She found the trail and followed it. She checked the wind. The animal's trail twisted and turned amidst the boulders and trees, but it seemed to be headed roughly downstream and upwind. _Good, that should keep it from finding me, and eventually pin the deer against the cliffs or the sea, if it doesn't stop first._

It wasn't long after that she spotted the deer. It had settled down again and was drinking from the stream, about thirty meters away through the trees. Sam crouched and pulled an arrow from the quiver. The deer kept drinking, oblivious to her. She carefully nocked the arrow to the string and stood up. _Okay, remember Grandma Iku's training_, she told herself. _Seisha hicchu_ was the phrase Iku had taught her. _Proper shooting equals certain accuracy._

_Check your target, check your footing, check your posture_, she told herself._ Last thing I want to do is thwack myself in the ear with a bowstring today._ She raised the bow. It was much shorter than a traditional Japanese _yumi_, but hopefully it would work just as well. The range was a little greater than what she'd practiced at, but she had seen _kyudoka_ make shots at twice that range in competitions. Iku claimed to be able to make shots at nearly 200 meters. She took a deep breath and cleared her mind. This wasn't competition: this was survival—she needed to make this shot count. She drew the bow to the corner of her mouth, lowering it as she did so. She took aim at where she believed the deer's heart was, and released the arrow as she exhaled.

She hit her target perfectly, but the arrow did not penetrate very deep in the animal's chest. It certainly got its attention, though. The deer bellowed, turned, and fled. As it did, it staggered a little, its right foreleg moving sluggishly and catching on rocks and branches. Even so, it did not take the deer very long to vanish from sight.

Sam swore. _So much for _seisha hicchu, she thought bitterly. _Give me a phaser and I'll hit the deer lethally for sure, and cook it too._ But she didn't have a phaser, so she would have to make due. She crossed the stream and scrambled up a pile of boulders, wanting to see if she could spot the deer from up there. She could. It was standing, stamping and breathing hard, an arrow lodged in its right shoulder. _I must have grazed a bone or something_, she thought. She nocked another arrow to her bow and drew again, aiming slightly further back. She released. The deer flinched and tried to take a step, but fell over onto its side.

Sam hurried toward the downed animal. It lay in the grass, its legs spasming, its breath coming in ragged pants. It was dying. She bit her lip. "Sorry," she whispered. She had never killed something up close and personal like this before. She didn't even know if the animal was aware of her. It breathed its last and then was still. Sam lowered her bow. "I can't let this go to waste." She needed to harvest all she could from the animal, but principally, for the moment, she needed enough meat to feed herself.

"Right, field dressing game using only a sharpened broadhead." She stripped off her uniform jacket and knelt beside the carcass. "This ought to be fun…"

* * *

Author's Note: Sam now follows Lara's footsteps through the first camp in the game. In the game, Lara comes across things that Sam (Nishimura, not Hayashi) left behind, taking a camcorder (for sentimental reasons, and to allow the game to establish what happened before the shipwreck using cutscenes of replayed footage), a two-way radio, and a single match. Obviously, Sam Hayashi only needs one of these things. I decided to make up a futuristic equivalent to a match, though, since I doubt anyone still makes them in the 25th Century.

I also included the medicine for her to treat herself, in accordance with my desire to address the issue of her wound more realistically than in the game. In the game, Lara does cauterize her wound with a flame-heated arrowhead, but she does so after a day or so of letting it go completely untreated, not even bandaged, and though she finds "relics" containing ancient medicines, she apparently does not think of using any to address the fact that she probably has every infection in the encyclopedia.

Another thing the game does not address is the wet-clothes issue. While Lara obviously suffers from being cold and wet before starting the fire, drying her clothes is neither seen nor implied—but then again, we are talking about the gray tanktop and camisole bra that are somehow magically able to stop her from bleeding out when she rips a piece of rebar out of her side in a cave. Perhaps they're also waterproof? Ah, but it is a fun game, despite the fridge-logic…

Sam's log entry is again based on one of Lara's journal entries. Her trip to the bottom of the ravine is a combination of two things that happen to Lara on the way to the Coastal Forest area. The first is her crossing an unstable log (successfully), the second is her perfectly grabbing a ledge, only to have it crumble and dump her down a steep slope. The cool platforming scene with the WWII-era bomber was something I couldn't really see Sam doing in her condition—not to mention I couldn't think of any suitably similar Star Trek craft—so I left it out even though I loved it in the game.

The title of this chapter comes from the name of the first quest you get after making it to this camp: hunting a deer for food, which proceeds pretty much exactly the same here as in the game. For some reason, no matter how I try I can never kill the deer on my first shot. When the deer is finally run down and killed, Lara apologizes to the dying animal and then dresses it using only the sharpened edge of a broadhead, which I suppose is theoretically possible. Of course, she manages to dress the animal by making a single cut down the length of its torso, which is somehow all she has to do to get meat off of it. I've read descriptions of the actual process of dressing game and it's…somewhat more involved, but I'll spare you the details!

But speaking of other details, _Kyudo_ is the Japanese practice of archery, and it can be as formal and intricate as any other form of martial arts. Practitioners are called _kyudoka_ and use the world's longest longbow, called a _yumi_. Many _Kyudo_ schools emphasize the phrase _seisha hicchu_, which means "true shooting, certain hitting" and conveys the idea that proper form and technique in shooting a bow guarantees accuracy. Before writing this chapter, I had a vague idea that _kyudo_ existed. I am indebted to the wisdom of Wikipedia for bringing me up to speed on what it actually is…but like Sam, I would really rather have a phaser—though for totally different reasons!


	8. Bodies and Histories

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

_**Bodies and Histories**_

* * *

USS Nautilus_, Senior Science Officer Carlin Agran's Log, Stardate 81627.7:_

_We've seen no sign of Sam Hayashi since the shuttle crash last night, but I know she must be alive. We believe she may have headed inland and set up camp inside a valley. We'll search the valley on our way inland to our next camp, splitting up to cover more ground. Tricorder scans and communications will be limited by the unexplained amounts of polaric radation on the planet, but losing track of each other isn't the only danger. Antori says he saw something or someone following us last night. We are not alone on this island._

* * *

"Alright, here's the plan," Antori said, after a breakfast of rations the next morning. "We're splitting up to search the valley for our missing crewmember. Carlin will be taking the left side of the valley. I'll be taking the right. Dr. Mor, I want you to cover the center."

"How are we supposed to search all of _that_?" Mor demanded, waving his arm at the rocky, forested wilderness. "We don't even have tricorders because of this polar energy."

"It's _polaric radiation_ and it's not evenly distributed," said Carlin. "According to the scan I ran this morning, there should be areas of higher and lower concentration, possibly shifting across the surface of the planet. I can't predict exactly where or when those lower concentrations will appear, but when they do they'll provide windows for us to use our tricorders and communicators."

"Dr. Mor, I trust you still have a scanner and a communicator?"

Mor huffed, rifled through his pockets, and pulled out a brown, angular device, a Ferengi scanner.

"Good, I want everyone to make regular scans every fifty meters, and attempt to report in every hour on the hour, understood?"

"Yes, sir," said Carlin.

Mor grumbled but nodded.

"Good, now I want both of you armed. Dr. Mor, you had a phaser somewhere in that junk we sorted through last night. Please tell me you kept it."

"What do you take me for, an idiot?" He fished through his pockets and pulled out a small silver plasma phaser.

"Do you remember how to use it, in a life or death situation?" Antori challenged, stepping toward him.

Mor took a step back and held the phaser low in one hand. "I…I think so...Yes, it's all coming back to me!"

"For your sake, I hope so," said Antori. He unclipped the phaser from his hip and handed it, holster and all, to Carlin. "Here, take this."

"But what about you?"

"I'm the one who's been training to wrestle with Gorn, remember?" He winked. "I'll be fine."

"I'll kill you if you let the Gorn win," she reminded him.

"I'll keep that in mind." He picked up his pack, which was lighter now that they'd split the remaining rations three ways, and turned toward the valley. "We'll meet again up on that cliff on the other side. The first one to get there stays there. I don't want to have to search for two missing people, understood." Everyone nodded and Antori gave the order, "Move out!"

They split up and descended into the valley. Soon the grassy slopes gave way to trees and gray boulders. Carlin kept her tricorder out and made periodic scans. She definitely read lifeforms, but they were small animals mostly—surprisingly Earth-like species, but not human…not Sam. She made her hourly calls, but her combadge remained mostly silent, with only occasional bursts of static and snatches of the other searchers reports. Once she was able to have a brief conversation with Dr. Mor, confirming that he was alright, had found nothing, and was highly annoyed by the nature of the search, but then the signal went to static and cut out again.

Clouds rolled in during the early afternoon and Carlin decided to start looking for shelter before it started raining. She managed to find something just as the first sprinkles were falling. It was some sort of a ground vehicle with a squat, rounded design and gray coloration. It was flipped on its side leaning against a tree with its back hatch open. She ran a scan and detected no lifeforms. She cautiously stepped inside.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness of the vehicle's aft compartment. When they did, she gasped at what she saw, and would have backed out of the vehicle if not for the rain that was starting to drum down on it. It was a body in an advanced state of decay. The remains were almost skeletal, covered with the tatters of some kind of uniform. She scanned them with her tricorder and got two surprises. The first was that the remains read as Vorta. The second was that the hand still held a data pad. She removed it carefully and used a power transfer from her tricorder to activate it. The display was in Dominionese, of course, but she ran a translation algorithm. "Looks like it contains some sort of audio logs." She tapped a button and the recordings began to play.

"It…it happened again," said the unsteady voice of a Vorta male. "It was Sixth Kusak'Uke this time. He was on gate duty at the main compound last night. No one heard or saw anything, and this morning, they found his rifle…nothing else. There were no tracks of his leaving, no blood, nothing! The power cell of his weapon was still fully charged—he didn't even get a shot off at whatever took him." The Vorta's voice dropped to a whisper. "The others are talking about Cardassian traitors, or maybe even Tal'Shiar agents. Damned fools! They have no idea what's happening here. I've read the files. I know the history of this place. It is the Oni who stalk us. The restless, evil spirits, they live in the old places of this world, mostly the very island where we've set up our main compound. We are trespassers here, and they are watching us, waiting. All these wrecks, the ruins, the complete lack of survivors…this entire planet is a graveyard. It is only a matter of time. The Oni will come for us, too."

"The _Oni_?" Carlin repeated. She had never heard of any race by that name.

The recording went on, beginning another log entry. "I was right, but there's no comfort in it," said the same voice. "Soon after we discovered the tomb, they came, the Oni. First the lights went out. Then…then the screaming started. Was it us or them? I didn't think Jem'Hadar _could_ scream, but the sound, it still rings in my ears. Weaponsfire, shouting, blood…We couldn't stop them. The Oni are like nothing we've ever faced before. They wore the armor of the humans' ancestors. They carried no modern weaponry, but it didn't matter. They cut the Jem'Hadar and the scientists down with ancient blades. Everything turned to chaos, and then silence. Then they were gone." There was a pause, then the voice fairly whispered, "Why did they leave? Why didn't they kill us all?" Then, the voice got louder again, trying to sound calm. "Osak'Artek is First now. We…we are leaving the base, but not the planet. We're heading inland, to the Monastery. There is no other way. We must follow the Oni, all of us. If we cannot control the Star, we must destroy it. Osak'Artek is leading his men through the ritual now, telling his men they are all dead already, that they are Jem'Hadar and they go to reclaim their lives in battle, for only in victory is there life…but I know…I know there will be no life. Whether we succeed in destroying the Star or not, we…we are all going to die."

Carlin shuddered and realized she was pulling at her hair. She made herself stop. _Whatever killed this Vorta and his Jem'Hadar did it over thirty years ago, judging from the decay. Whatever the Oni were, they're long gone by now._

The next log entry began to play. It was the same Vorta's voice, but he sounded different. He was breathing hard and in the background she heard sounds, as if someone were dragging himself along the ground. "We never…never had a chance," the Vorta said, obviously in pain. "They were waiting for us, hundreds of them. We never even made it to the sacred chamber. From the beginning, we were doomed. Now, I wait for the Founders to take me." There was a scrambling noise, then the voice whispered. "I can hear them. The Oni are killing the last of my Jem'Hadar, eating them, consuming their souls. So much death! I'm the last one. What is my fate? Will I become one of them? …Founders hear me. Please, take me away from all this. Take me to the afterlife. Let me die in peace."

Then, there was silence. Carlin looked down and saw that she'd just listened to the final log entry. It was chilling. She disengaged the power transfer and did a full scan of the remains. "Definitely a violent death," she said. "One of the ribs was severed by something extremely sharp." _And that means what the Vorta said about the Oni could be true_. She pulled at her ponytail, then tapped her combadge. "Agran to Drel."

There was silence for a minute, then a reply came, difficult to make out with the static, but definitely there. "This…Drel. Carlin, are you alright?"

She breathed a sigh of relief. She was in luck. "I'm fine," she assured him. "But I've made some rather alarming discoveries."

"What d…mean?"

Carlin decided to get on with it, before the interference cut the channel entirely. "I found a Vorta's body and some logs. There's evidence of an organized Dominion presence on this island over thirty years ago, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is the Dominion presence was wiped out by a race they called the Oni."

"Then at least we don't have to worry about the Dominion…any more," said Antori. "They probably set up a base here in secret during the War…years ago. As for these Oni, if they took out a Dominion force…are a serious threat. Any idea if they're still around?"

"None," said Carlin.

"Then stay on…guard. The rain…soon. Keep searching for…" The voice trailed off into static and then her combadge went silent again. Carlin sighed. She pulled out a ration pack, ate it, and then waited for the rain to stop.

When the rain stopped, she continued her search. Not far from the overturned vehicle, she found a Jem'Hadar plasma rifle. Its power cell was completely drained and there was no sign of its owner. She remembered what the Vorta had said about his Jem'Hadar's last stand against the Oni. From then on, she traveled with her phaser in one hand, her tricorder in the other, and the pack containing her medkit slung across her back.

An hour after leaving the vehicle, she was walking along the base of a cliff. There was some sort of a cave opening on her left, with its entrance braced with wooden beams and decorated above with faint lime drawings she couldn't quite make out. She ran a scan and gasped. She was detecting a subspace distress beacon, on a Federation emergency channel. It was weak, but it was consistent with what one could generate using a Starfleet combadge. It was coming from somewhere inside the cave. "Sam!" she shouted. "Sam! It's Carlin, can you hear me?" There was no answer. Carlin set her tricorder to track the distress beacon and followed it into the cave.

There were definitely signs of activity inside the cave, recent activity. Before the daylight from the entrance faded, she came to a place where a crude oil lamp hung, a simple metal bowl filled with burning petroleum. There were several crude wooden torches hanging on the wall beside it. She holstered her phaser and lit one, then proceeded deeper into the passageway.

The ceiling lowered so that Carlin almost had to duck, then turned to the right. There, along the wall, she found several small carved niches, each containing an engraving of a humanoid figure, most of them seated. The carvings were too worn for her to make out anything else. The passageway continued and she was still reading the distress beacon ahead. She continued on, crouching to pass under a particularly low section before coming to a chamber with carved niches identical to those in the first. There were also discarded modern containers, too, though she didn't recognize any of them. The passage ended at a hissing wall of water. It seemed she was under some sort of small subterranean waterfall. The distress beacon was still ahead, though, so she braced herself and stepped through the sheet of water.

The cold soaking was a shock. The darkness as her torch went out, even more so. The only light was the display of her tricorder. It was reading a blockage of loose rubble just ahead, with the distress beacon somewhere beyond it, in open air. She dropped the extinguished torch and drew her phaser, setting it to its highest setting and firing at the blockage. Rock vaporized and the rubble shattered, exploding to leave her a clear path. Light filtered in from an exit somewhere up ahead. Carlin descended the slick stone slope, careful not to lose her footing, and soon found herself just outside the cave, at the edge of a swamp.

The water was hip deep and there was no recourse but to wade into it. Fortunately, it was warm, unlike the waterfall earlier. There were definite signs of ancient inhabitation here. There was a wooden arch and several larger-than-life statues of human women in long flowing robes, one still standing, and the other fallen and submerged so that only the face was above water.

There were bodies, too. The first she saw dangling upside down from a rope near the entryway. She swallowed and scanned it. It was human, judging by a skeletal system, but it was badly decayed and had been there probably for years. There was no indication of what had killed him, but Carlin's mind leapt to the descriptions of the Oni. She kept her phaser at the ready. A little further on she found the second body, washed up on the margins of the swamp and stripped of all clothing. It was probably only a few days old, though it was already beginning to decompose. The corpse was male, and clearly Romulan. A disruptor burn on the back of its head gave a clear cause of death. Her scan revealed residual hadrons and ions, consistent with Klingon disruptor fire. _That's horrible_, Carlin thought, resisting the urge to tug at her hair—mostly because her hands were full. _As if the Oni weren't enough to worry about, now there are crash survivors running around shooting each other in the back of the head and dumping the bodies in swamps!_

She checked her tricorder. There were still no lifesigns, but the distress beacon was up ahead somewhere. She came around a bend and gasped. There was a _Peregrine_-class fighter crashed in the swamp, held up out of the water by several trees it had impaled itself on in landing. Beyond it were some wooden towers with a highly stylized architecture built beside an enormous statue of a woman in flowing robes. The architecture reminded Carlin of some of the recreations of traditional Japanese buildings that Sam had taken her to see back when they were at the Academy together. _But if those are the original buildings from over 2,000 years ago, how are they still standing?_ She checked her tricorder and got another surprise. The distress beacon was not coming from the downed fighter, as she'd expected, but from a room at the top of the nearest tower.

"Sam!" she called out. "Sam, can you hear me?" There was still no answer. _She may be unconscious. I'll just have to go in there and find her myself._

The problem was she could see no way of reaching the top of the tower. There was a rope strung from its roof to the top of a wooden archway. It would serve as a good zip line, but there was no way to reach it from the ground. She examined the fighter. It was heavily damaged, its systems no doubt inoperable, but it might still have a more basic use. _If I could lower the bow, I could use it as a ramp to climb up to the roof of that first building_. From there, a hole in the building's wall provided access to the interior.

She made her way through the swamp till she sighted a thick trunk that was supporting the weight of the forward sections of the fighter. She fired her phaser at it. A portion of the trunk vaporized, and the rest shattered and caught fire, only to fall and be extinguished in the swamp. Then, the bow of the fighter pitched downward as its balance shifted. It was now in easy reach, and its tail almost reached the roof of the old building.

Carlin scrambled up onto the fighter. She paused to examine the cockpit, but it was empty. She continued on to the tail, from which she was able to pull herself onto the roof. She ran a scan of the wood to satisfy her curiousity. It was suffused with polaric ions, which had put it in a state of temporal flux akin to a stasis field. _I guess that explains the preservation_, she mused. _These ruins could be millions of years old and still not show any sign of decay_.

She shook her head. The distress beacon was just on the other side of the wall. She stepped through the hole in the wall to the room where the distress beacon originated. The room was lit by a profusion of red candles and her mouth went dry when she saw what they surrounded. There was a human body, female, burned beyond recognition, bound to a wooden stake at the center of the room. More of her uniform remained than her flesh. It was an older Starfleet tunic, red on black, probably from the late 24th Century. A combadge was still on her breast, the casing cracked with heat, activating the emergency beacon.

Carlin gingerly removed the combadge and tapped it to deactivate it. She scanned it for an ID. "Chief Petty Officer Heidi Cook." She tucked it into her uniform pocket. "I'll make sure this gets back to your family, if they're still alive." For now, she had to make sure nothing like this happened to Sam.

She found a loose board and used it to descend the zipline, splashing down into the water at the bottom. Then she headed back through the cave. It was dark, so she took it slowly and carefully. She also kept her phaser at the ready, mindful of all the dangers on this island. She stepped through the sheet of water and felt her way forward. She forgot about the section where the roof came down, though. She bumped her head and stepped back, startled.

That was when it happened. Whatever she stepped on wasn't stable and shifted beneath her weight. Her right ankle went one way, and her leg went the other way. She heard something pop and she felt a sharp pain in her ankle. She cried out and fell. Her phaser and tricorder clattered away into the darkness. She managed to find the latter because of its bright, blinking displays, but the phaser was nowhere to be found.

"Who's there?" a male voice said from somewhere ahead. Carlin froze. "I heard you," the voice said. "Are you hurt? I saw the shuttle crash, and I'm here to help. I promise."

Carlin swallowed. She could feel her ankle swelling, definitely sprained, possibly broken. She needed time to treat it before she tried to move on her own, which meant if this man meant her harm, she was defenseless and he would easily find her. On the other hand…

"I twisted my ankle," she said. "I'm Lieutenant Carlin Agran of the starship _USS Nautilus_. Our shuttle crashed here during the ion storm."

Torchlight came around the corner, followed by a Cardassian man in worn civilian clothing carrying a wooden crutch. "Don't worry," he said when he saw her. A small smile spread across his lips. "I'll get you out of there, I promise. …My name is Matan."

* * *

Author's Note: In the Tomb Raider game, the Imperial Japanese army had several bases on Yamatai during World War II. I've substituted the Dominion, as they were the antagonists of the last major war the Alpha and Beta Quadrants fought. Thus the Vorta's logs are a compilation of the "Wartime Intelligence" documents recorded by an unnamed soldier in the game. The first of these documents is found in an overturned army truck early in the game and the rest are found scattered around the island throughout the game. I didn't want to have my characters constantly having to find and read lose scraps of paper and data pads, so I compressed these documents into a single find.

The Jem'Hadar ritual is mentioned in the DS9 episode "To The Death."

The second half of this chapter is based on a downloadable optional tomb in the game, "The Tomb of the Lost Adventurer." In the game, of course, it has zero plot relevance, but I needed Carlin to meet Matan somewhere, and also witness a preview of the dangers of Yamatai. The puzzle is greatly simplified, of course, and the reward at the end was an unspecified relic in the game, but here I made it a distress beacon Carlin would actually be interested in going after right now. The fact that combadges start broadcasting distress beacons if damaged was established in _Voyager_'s "Time and Again." The weapon's signature of a Klingon disruptor is apparently from an episode of the _Enterprise_ prequel series. Hopefully they haven't changed it over the past 300+ years?

There's apparently some debate as to what, exactly, a _Peregrine_-class is. I just went with the STO explanation and made it the unnamed fighter class used in "Sacrifice of Angels." Another mystery for me was the presence of well-preserved Japanese buildings on Yamatai in the Tomb Raider game, when supposedly these buildings had not been cared for in almost two thousand years. I resolved this with polaric energy, which is established to have subspace and temporal effects—and those can do anything: so there! :P

Matan returns! What will become of our heroine now?


	9. Meeting Matan

Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.

* * *

_**Meeting Matan**_

* * *

_Samantha Hayashi's Log, Stardate 81629…give or take:_

_Well, I have food now, and I'm no longer impaled with a piece of metal. Go me. I'm still alone, though, and wounded. I need to find the others, or find some way to make sure they find me—without anyone else finding me first. The problem is, I can't think of any way at all…And the other problem is it seems I can't cook the food I have. So that's what venison smells like when it's burning...Ugh!_

* * *

Night found Sam back in her camp, roasting deer meat on a spit. She hoped this piece turned out better than the last one. It had been barely edible, burnt on one side and raw on the other. _No one ever accused me of being a good cook._ Her stomach rumbled. _God, I would kill for a replicator right now._

At least she had meat to cook badly, and though her side was still in constant pain, it was no longer a life-threatening injury—at least, she didn't think so. Her last tricorder scan of the wound showed no infection, and nothing that was obviously serious to the untrained eye.

_All this means is that I need to start moving again soon_, she thought. _I need to find the others, I need to get back to the _Nautilus_, and I need medical aid from someone who actually knows what he's doing._ But even without a gaping hole or a piece of metal in her side, that was going to prove difficult. Climbing up the ravine to the place where she'd last seen her shipmates' trail was going to be difficult or impossible with her injury. She supposed that, given enough time, she could figure some way around it, like a crude ladder made from a fallen tree or something—but in that time, all trace of the others' trail would be washed away.

_If I can't get to them, maybe I can get them to come to me_, she thought. But there were problems with that idea, too. So far, her communicator had shown only the briefest hint of functionality against whatever it was that was jamming it and her tricorder. She didn't have much hope that a signal from it would reach anyone, which left her with more primitive means, like large smoky fires that would be visible to searchers from the air. But the problem with that was that any such primitive signal would be equally visible to any other survivors living on this island, and if the Bolian in the cave and the fate of the archer were any indications, she would really rather not meet the natives…ever!

_And that leaves me with precisely zero good options_. Sam frowned. Then she wrinkled her nose. She smelled something burning…besides the campfire.

She looked up and found that the piece of meat she'd been roasting had caught fire. Hungry yellow flames were devouring it and growing by the second. Sam yelped and tossed the spit down into the dirt. She kicked sand over it until it was half buried and fully extinguished. Then, she gingerly removed it. The meat was ruined, of course. The spit probably was, too. She tried removing the charred meat and the wooden spit broke in half. _Yep, definitely ruined_. Sam sighed. _I need to learn how to cook or I'm gonna starve to death while sitting next to a pile of fresh meat…dying alone on an unnamed island on an unexplored planet in the middle of nowhere._

She felt tears welling at that last thought and she shook it off. _Get a hold of yourself, Sam. _Nautilus_ will come for you. I don't know how they'll find you, but they'll figure out a way. You're going to make it off this planet and everything is going to be fine_, she told herself. To which another part of her replied, _Liar_.

She was about to get up to see if she could find another branch to use as a spit, when suddenly her combadge came alive without warning. It chirped once and a man's voice began: "This is Commander Antori Drel, first officer of the _USS Nautilus_, to anyone in range. We've crashed on a planet inside the Dragon's Head Nebula."

Sam snatched up her combadge and tapped it frantically. "Drel? Drel!"

"Sam!"

"You're alive!" she said, smiling for the first time in entirely too long. "Thank God!"

"Easy, easy," said Drel. "Are you okay? What happened?"

"I remember seeing you all on a beach," said Sam. "Then I must have been hit from behind, because it all went black and I woke up in a cave. There was this crazy Bolian…and a dead body." She shuddered at the memory.

"Where are you now?" asked Commander Drel. "Are you safe?"

Sam nodded, blinking back tears. Then she said, "I'm injured, but I managed to get away and then fell down a ravine. I'm in a camp in a forested valley somewhere near the coast, and I need medical attention."

"How bad is it?"

Sam touched her side and winced. "Nothing life-threatening, I think. I did some self-treatment, and I should be alright for a little while. I can still move, hunt, and travel, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable if a professional looked at it."

"I'll tell Carlin as soon as I can get a signal to her. Meanwhile, listen," said Antori. "I took the emergency transponder from the shuttle and I think I can rig it to transmit a signal powerful enough to cut through this polaric radiation to _Nautilus_. I spoke with Carlin and Dr. Mor this morning. We're regrouping at my location, at the top of a cliff near the base of a mountain, just inland from the forested valley. It should be easy to find."

Sam shook her head. She had no idea how far this valley extended, and she did not feel that confident in her ability to travel. "Please come and get me," she said.

"I have to stay here, otherwise we just wind up with more people lost," said Drel. "You can do this, Sam, I know you can. The key is knowing that all you've got to do is just keep moving."

Sam smirked and dried her eyes. "You sound like Conrad Saganami."

"He still teaching…survival?" The signal began to break up. Antori must have realized as well, because his voice became more urgent. "Remember everything he taught you, Sam. You're ready for this. …and keep your combadge on."

"Okay," said Sam. "I mean, yes, sir."

There was no reply. The channel went to static and cut out entirely a few seconds later.

Sam stood. "Well, I can either sit here enjoying my loathsome cooking or I can get moving and try to meet up with the others." It wasn't a hard decision. She had eaten enough to take the edge off her hunger anyway. She slung the bow and the quiver across her shoulders, gathered up the makeshift bag she'd made for the deer meat out of the animal's pelt and tied it closed with a strip of hide, and kicked out the fire. She started hiking inland. Night had fallen, but the glow of the nebula overhead was bright enough to cast shadows.

She had not gone far when she heard something. "Music?" It was the sound of a woman singing. The words were indecipherable and the tune was like something out of the ancient Earth Orient. It was haunting to hear those sounds here, in the woods. Still, it was a sign of life. She decided to follow it. She hid the bag of deer meat under a bush, un-slung her bow, and put an arrow on the string—just in case.

Following the music led her back to the bunker where she'd found the archer's body hanging. This time, the door was open and flickering torchlight shone from inside.

"Is there someone there?" she called, but there was no answer. She stepped closer, cautiously raising her bow. The door was jammed open, its servos cycling endlessly, never moving the door more than a few centimeters. Someone had jury-rigged the exterior control panel. She peeked into the bunker, but saw only worn blank walls. She stepped past the door carefully. Inside, the room was empty its walls and floors stripped, leaving only a improvised holder for the torch that lit the interior. There were no exits except a maintenance hatch on the floor, which had been torn open, the hatch itself having been carried away somewhere a long time ago.

"Looks like someone, or several someones came through here and took everything that wasn't bolted down…and a few things that were, too." She could still hear the music though, echoing up from the maintenance shaft. She edged closer, her bow half-drawn.

Suddenly, sparks flew from the outside panel as the controls shorted out. The door slammed shut, and this time it did not reopen. Sam rushed to the interior controls, but whoever had cleaned the bunker out had also scavenged some of the critical components of the door controls—like the interface panel for one. The controls were useless and the door was very firmly sealed.

"Well, maybe that tunnel leads to a way out of here." Sam returned to the shaft. It was dark. _I guess whoever ransacked this place took the lights, too_. She returned the nocked arrow to her quiver and the bow to her shoulder, then took the torch down from the wall. By its light, she carefully descended the ladder into the maintenance shaft.

The shaft descended for three meters. The passageway she found at the bottom was flooded and partially collapsed. It was also decorated rather…distinctively. There were crude lime-wash paintings on the dark duracrete. One was of a stylized sun. The other was of a woman in flowing robes. It looked exactly like the painting she'd seen in the cave, the one that had been the center of the shrine with the dead Bajoran. _I guess that means the crazy Bolian's the one who ransacked this place…him or one of his friends_. She shuddered. Now there was a truly unpleasant thought!

The water in the passageway came up to her waist, but she waded through it easily enough. Soon, she came to a wall that had also been painted in lime-wash. Here, a stylized sun was accompanied by scores upon scores of tally marks. _What is this? Some kind of a roll call for the Creepy Scavenger Society of Yamatai?_ She hoped not. From the looks of this wall, they had a pretty impressive membership.

Just past the wall she came to what must have once been a control room, elevated a meter above the rest of the maintenance passageway, which kept its floor above the water level. Like the rooms above, it had been thoroughly ransacked some time ago, but unlike them, it had been redecorated. This decoration went beyond simple crude white paintings. Here, there were shelves along the walls lined with skulls: many of them from animals, but some clearly from humanoids. There was also a makeshift cot here with a blanket made from the pelt of a deer. Beneath and around the cot, the floor was littered with empty bottles. Above it, on the wall, someone had written the words "No one leaves" in white paint. The eerie music was coming from an adjoining room. When Sam peeked cautiously in there, she found something that looked like what the holovids had shown of old livestock slaughterhouses. There were half-butchered animal carcasses hanging from hooks on the ceiling, and one corner of the room was full of bones and discarded body parts. Flies droned around everything. The music was coming from an antique recording device, sitting on a crude wooden table next to a slab of raw meat. There was no one in sight, but clearly someone had been here recently.

"God, this is insane!" Sam made her way back to the other room, determined to find a way out. There was a door in this room, but like the door upstairs, the controls had been torn apart for salvage. Here, though, the manual release had been exposed. She set down her torch, reached in, and pulled the release down with both hands. The metal was corroded, but it finally gave way with a snap and the door opened. Then, she picked up her torch again and left the horrible room behind her.

Beyond it was another maintenance passageway, much like the first, and like the first it led to a vertical shaft opening up into a barren room on the surface. The door on this side had been torn away by some massive force, leaving only an opening in the duracrete bunker. Beyond it, she could hear voices, one was a woman's, the other a man's. She dropped the torch and stamped it out while readying her bow. She crept forward with an arrow nocked and the bow half drawn.

The voices were coming from around a campfire surrounded by boulders on top of a small hill up ahead. "Hold on, let me find out," the woman's voice was saying.

_Carlin?_

"We're on the southwest side," said a male voice she did not recognize. "He'll need to follow the path. It's a bit of a climb."

"Did you get that?" asked the woman. This time, Sam heard it clearly. It was definitely Carlin!

"Got it," said the voice of Dr. Mor, accompanied with static.

"We have a fire," said Carlin. "Look for the smoke."

"Good. I'm on my way. Mor, out."

As the conversation finished, Sam stepped carefully around a boulder and into the firelight. She saw Carlin there, seated on an old cargo container. Carlin saw her too and her face lit. "Sam, you made it!"

"Carlin! Thank goodness…" Sam began, but then she spotted movement to her right. She raised her bow again automatically.

"Um…surprise," said Carlin. There was a balding Cardassian man in the camp with her, pushing himself to his feet with the aid of a wooden crutch. Sam regarded him suspiciously, but Carlin said, "It's okay, he's one of us."

"What do you mean?" asked Sam, still not lowering her bow.

"He's a crash survivor, just trying to get by."

"Sorry if I startled you," the man said. "This place would make anyone a little jumpy. We just spoke to a member of your crew. He's on his way."

Sam nodded and lowered the bow.

"Look, he helped me treat my foot," Carlin said, pulling up the leg of her uniform pants. She had removed her boot and her ankle was in a splint made of two sticks wrapped with linen. "It should hold it until the regenerator is able to fully repair my sprained ankle."

"It was the least I could do," said the man. He turned back to Sam. "My manners, I'm sorry…I'm Matan." He extended a hand in greeting. "A teacher by trade…not really cut out for island life, I'm afraid."

Sam made herself let go of the bowstring and shake Matan's hand. _What are you so worked up about, girl?_ she scolded herself. _It's like Carlin said, he's just a crash victim like us, trying to get by. There's no reason to assume that everyone on this planet is like the crazy Bolian in the cave._ She set down the bow and introduced herself. "Lieutenant Sam Hayashi, Starfleet, _USS Nautilus_."

"A pleasure to meet you, Miss Hayashi," said Matan, smiling.

"Good," said Carlin. "Now that we're all friends and we've stopped threatening each other with primitive weapons, Sam, why don't you sit down? You look exhausted…and is that blood on your jacket?"

Sam sat down and brushed at her uniform. "Blood and mud," she said.

"I'm more concerned about the former, to be honest," said Carlin. She pulled a medkit out of her pack and crossed to her friend, limping a little because of the splint. "Please tell me it's not all yours."

"It isn't. A lot of it belonged to a deer. Somehow I don't remember dressing game under Commander Saganami being quite so…messy."

"But some of it _is _yours?" Sam nodded and Carlin knelt beside her, pulling out a medical tricorder. "What happened?"

"I took a couple tumbles…one of them more eventful than the other."

Carlin's eyes went wide. "Eventful? Sam, you have severe burns, perforated abdominal muscles, and internal bleeding, all on your left side. What did you _do_?"

"I fell about three meters and met a piece of rebar on the way down. It decided it wanted to be close to me…very close, as in through and out the other side."

Carlin winced. "And the burns?"

"I cauterized the wound."

"You did _what_?!"

"I was afraid you'd say that," said Sam, looking down. "I didn't have much choice, though. I needed to get that thing out of me, and I had to stop the bleeding somehow."

Carlin leaned close. "Well, don't tell Doctor Howard that I said this, but given the circumstances, I think you did the right thing." She opened up the medkit. "Of course, that doesn't mean that you won't need medical attention to recover from your cure. I need to treat your burns and threat the interior of the wound channel. This'll be easier if you lie down."

"Yes, ma'am." Sam removed her quiver and set it with her bow, then lay down, taking off her jacket as she did so. She peeled back her undershirt and helped Carlin remove her bandages so she could examine the wound, but then Carlin brushed her hands gently aside, apparently wanting to concentrate on the wound alone. Sam sighed and lay back.

"Miss Agran here was telling me about your mission, before the crash," said Matan, sitting across the fire from them. "She said it had something to do with the Sun Queen."

"It's true," said Sam, turning her head to look at him. "We came here hoping to find Yamatai, the ancient land from which the Sun Queen Himiko ruled the Japanese archipelago on Earth…according to legend, that is."

"Tell me more, I'm intrigued," said Matan.

Sam settled back while Carlin rifled through her medkit. "Over two thousand years ago, Himiko ruled the Japanese archipelago. She came to the land when it was dominated by warring kings and Stone Age technology, and she brought peace, iron and bronze metallurgy, weaving, and agriculture. She was generous, but also mysterious and dangerous. The people worshiped her, and she surrounded herself with a court of Priestesses of the Sun, with only one man in attendance: the honored general of her mighty Stormguard warriors. She—Ow!"

"Sorry," said Carlin, adjusting her grip on a medical tool and running it over Sam's wound again. It still hurt, but less this time.

"It's alright," Sam assured. "It sure hurts a lot less than _my_ treatment options."

Carlin smirked. "I'll bet."

Sam tried to ignore her and whatever she was doing. She turned her attention back to Matan. "What was I saying?"

"You were talking about the Sun Queen," he said. "I may be wrong, but I've heard she had…unusual abilities."

Sam smiled. "You can say that again. They say she had the power to summon storms, or dispel them at will. They say she could read thoughts and used this ability to manipulate spies sent to her courts. Her Stormguard was invincible: no mortal weapon could touch them, and she herself was said to be immortal, with her youth renewing each and every generation."

"Truly she was no ordinary woman," said Matan. "Do you know what happened to her?"

Sam shrugged. "No one knows. One day Himiko and Yamatai simply disappeared from the pages of history. We'd hoped we would find out here." She smiled. "Actually, it's been kind of a life-long dream for me…after joining Starfleet, of course. Ever since my grandmother told me the legend of Yamatai, I wanted to be the one to find it."

"You're from Earth, then?" asked Matan. "From Japan?"

"I wasn't born there, but it's where my ancestors come from…half of them in any case."

"Sorry to interrupt," said Carlin. "But I'm going to have to reopen the wound channel to flush out some contaminants. I'll have to sedate you."

"Go ahead," said Sam. "I could use a good night's sleep anyway."

Carlin chuckled and the hypospray hissed against her neck. It was the last sound Sam heard that night.

* * *

_Solarii Field Notes, Main Island: Father Matan's record: Monday, May 28, 2407, a quarter till midnight:_

_I am at the site where the survivors of the most recent crash came ashore. Brother John tells me it was a shuttlecraft, of modern Starfleet design. It went down in deep water, and it is unlikely we will be able to find anything salvageable of it. I have found the survivors though. They suspect nothing, but they know much. They could prove useful in their own ways, but there is something even more important here. One of their number, Sam Hayashi, is actually of my Queen's own blood, a child of Japan. I can hear Her whispering to me: The Sun Queen wants this one for Her own. It may be she is the key we've been looking for all these years..._

* * *

Matan waited patiently and made pleasant conversation while the Starfleet doctor, Agran, finished treating Sam Hayashi. He pretended to fall asleep so that she would do likewise. It took a while: she was on edge, hoping to wait up for the crewmate they had contacted, hoping to hear from one more, apparently. None of that mattered to Matan, but he waited patiently. _I have not spent all these years waiting and searching just to spoil everything with impatience now_. He felt a smile twitch up the corner of his mouth. _Besides, now that I have the key before me, there'll be no more waiting!_

To be fair, he didn't actually know if this girl, Sam, _was_ the key. She would have to undergo the ritual, the trial by fire. Only there would the Sun Queen make Her will fully known. For now he sensed…interest. Yes, and stronger perhaps than any time before. _I will free you, my Queen_, he swore silently. _I will find the one you seek, and you will rule once more…and I will be reborn, set free from this hellish, dark world!_

Once the Trill woman was asleep, Matan rose silently, without the aid of the crutch. He let the unnecessary prop lie forgotten where it was. He pulled a communicator from his pocket, bulky with all attachments and modifications it had needed to be useful in the constant interference. "Communications Base, patch me through to the transporter operator."

"Yes, Father Matan," came the answer.

A moment later, another voice spoke. "The transporter is ready when you are, Father," said the man on the other end.

"Good," said Matan. He crept around the fire to where Sam lay and knelt over her. "Prepare for multiple transports. Lock on to my com signal and beam back two on my mark."

"You found one for the ritual, Father?"

"Yes, and understand that she is to be treated as the last one should have been. It would be a shame if I had to kill any more of you for polluting our Queen's offerings."

The man on the other end swallowed audibly. "Of course, Father," he said. "Where there any other survivors?"

"Three. The others could prove interesting. Have Vamdar get his men ready. I want them taken alive if possible, but if not…he knows what to do."

"Of course, Father," said the transporter operator. "It shall be done for the glory of the Sun Queen."

"For the glory of the Sun Queen," he repeated. _Soon everyone will know Her glory as I do_. He held his communicator over Sam's sleeping form. "Two to beam back," he ordered. He and Sam vanished in a swirl of green light.

* * *

Author's Note: Sam finally figured out the Stardate. Presumably, she had a chance to look at her tricorder, which probably keeps track of such things...I mean, it does everything else! Except cooking, that is, and apparently neither does Sam. I don't like characters who are good at everything-they just don't strike me as believable-so Sam's weakness is officially cooking.

The conversation between Sam and Antori is based on the first conversation between Lara and Roth in the Tomb Raider game. The only difference is that in the game Lara breaks down in the middle of the conversation and blames everything on herself, but I just couldn't see that as in-character for Sam at the moment, so consequently the conversation stayed more focused.

The music, the bunker, and its interior are all from the game. Who the bunker belongs to and why it suddenly started playing music is never explained in the game, but since it's obviously Solarii and you meet Mathias shortly thereafter, it's safe to assume it might belong to him. The meeting with Matan is much the same as the meeting with Mathias, except that Lara is just standoffish at first, whereas Sam actually holds a weapon on him.

From there, the honor of playing Lara Croft is passed to Carlin, as Sam begins to tell more about Himiko and Yamatai, as her namesake Sam Nishimura does in the game. Since I used that particular dialogue in a previous chapter, I went more in-depth. There is some real history: according to Chinese histories, Himiko was chosen as Queen after decades of fighting between various Japanese kings. It's claimed that she had one thousand women attendants and only one man. In the game, this is made out to be her Priestesses of the Sun and the general of the Stormguard. Historically, the Yayoi Period in which she ruled saw the sudden introduction of iron and bronze work, weaving, and organized rice agriculture into a land which had previously only known Stone Age civilization with limited agriculture. The rest, of course, is fiction, mostly condensed versions of concepts introduced through various documents in the game (such as her ability to manipulate spies).

I was going to have Sam stick around for a few more chapters here (she'll be back, I promise...or will she? Hee-hee-hee!), but when I presented the situation to Matan and asked my villainous character to kindly call in his baddies and exit stage left without kidnapping her, he said, "Screw this, I've got a transporter!" and I really couldn't argue with that logic. Thus, Sam disappears while her friend sleeps, just as it happens in the game.

"Vamdar," whom you should meet next chapter, is the Klingon answer to the game's Vladimir.


End file.
